The relative truth of freezing motion with high shutter speeds.

A shutter speed of 1/3200th of a second freezes the action.

If you look closely, you can see where dust is knocked off the ball from hitting the bat.  Yup, the ball is screaming away from the bat after being hit, and it is frozen in time.  The shutter speed is fast; not fast enough to freeze a bullet (1/16,000th of a second - with flash), but still enough to capture the moment in clarity.  

The degree of frozen motion is relative.  In the above image, every aspect seems to be crisp, even the end of the bat appears motionless.  A closer look changes that illusion though.  Look at the image below; it is the ball and bat (and dust) enlarged.  It seems that the closer you get, the more motion is shown.  This is true, and you can see it when shooting an image from a moving car.  Foreground objects show motion blur while things in the distance appear in greater degrees of definition.  

Close up of the above photo - as you get closer to a moving object, more motion blur appears.

Another factor in freezing action has to do with the path of the object across the camera's focal plane.  Things moving at right angles to the camera (parallel to the focal plane) will show more motion blur than the same object moving towards (or away) from the camera (perpendicular to the focal plane) at the same speed and distance.  It has to do with the change in position over time, and although both images would have the same delta distance (Δd), the one parallel will produce a trail while the one perpendicular has no trail but rather changes in relative size.  The difference is significant in the end result of the image, both in terms of blur and the image itself.

Another factor has to do with the type of shutter used.  Global shutters capture the image all at once while focal plane shutters capture it in thin slices that progress along a vertical path.  That's more than I want to get into right now.

Thanks for reading.     www.ericspix.com

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