Ten elements of zoom photography

If you want to play something new with your digital camera, you can try to use the zoom effect the next time you take a picture. The essence of zoom effect is to make the photo look like the subject is moving towards you or away from you, and also dragging the moving lines.

We can achieve this effect in many ways, some are taking certain skills in shooting, and some are using zoom blur effect in post-processing. We don't discuss post-processing skills here, but only focus on shooting skills.

To achieve this effect, the most basic thing is to set a slow shutter speed when shooting to ensure that the exposure time is long enough, so that you have the opportunity to use your zoom lens to enlarge or reduce the object during the exposure process (between shutter opening and closing).

This is the most basic point to take a photo with zoom effect, but in practice, to take a better photo, you need to do some contact and experiments, and maybe you need a little luck.

The following tips can help you improve your work:

1. Keep the camera stable.

Because you need to use a slow shutter speed, any camera shake will greatly damage your shooting effect. What you want is the motion effect of zoom, so any camera shaking from left to right and up and down will make the lines generated by the enlarged picture not smooth enough. Of course, camera shake may add some interesting effects to the photos, but it may also make the photos too blurred. In order to minimize camera shake, it is recommended to use a tripod or put the camera on a fixed platform.

Step 2 shoot in low light

One of the biggest problems with long exposure is that too much light will enter the camera. You can set the camera to shoot with a smaller aperture. However, in a bright scene, you may not get enough exposure time without overexposing the picture. Therefore, if you shoot in a low light environment, it is more conducive to obtaining a zoom effect.

Shoot interesting light

For zoom special effects, the most popular shooting theme is probably light, whether it is city lights, Christmas lights, neon lights or others. These are all good places to practice scaling special effects skills, and you can create quite spectacular effects by using these themes.

4. Move the camera manually

If you don't have a zoom lens or your camera can't change the focal length during exposure (for some small digital cameras with simple functions), you can also manually move the camera away from or close to your subject to get a zoom effect. Of course, this will cause camera shake (see the picture above), but if you are skilled enough or lucky enough, you may still take beautiful photos.

5. Choose the appropriate exposure time

When choosing the shutter speed, you should know that there is no fixed shutter speed value that can meet all the requirements. Factors such as light intensity and zoom speed will affect the choice of shutter speed. Usually I take 1 sec or longer, which is usually enough time for you to twist the zoom lens from one end to the other. The key is to experiment by yourself and use different shutter speeds to see which effect is the best.

6. Continuous smooth zoom

In order to get a smooth picture of moving lines, you need to practice continuous and smooth zooming. In other words, you can't zoom in and out (the next move is an exception), which will make the lines in your picture look a little moved and paused. It takes practice to reach the state of soft zoom.

7. Pause when zooming.

This is another skill worth trying. You can stop zooming at the beginning, end or during zooming (while the shutter is still open). This will mean that the camera's exposure time to this pause point will be longer and the exposure will be stronger, so it will eventually appear clearer in the photo at this moment.

Use flash

This is another technique that can be used to scale the effect. You can achieve this effect by using any light, but the most common one is obviously a flash. In the process of long exposure, the flash can solidify that part of the picture, but there is still a scaling effect around and behind the shiny theme. Some cameras support this function in night vision mode.

9. Reverse scaling

Zooming from telephoto end to wide-angle end is very different from zooming from wide-angle end to telephoto end, especially when the object you are shooting is moving or you pause at the beginning or end of zooming. All kinds of effects are worth a try.

10. Only part of the coke section is used.

Some lenses have a wide focal length, such as 18-200mm. If you use this lens to take a zoom effect, if you change it from 18 to 200, the effect may be a bit exaggerated. It may be more effective to zoom with only a part of the focal length of the lens, such as 28 to 100, or 80 to 200, or even less.