Michael Soo

One surefire way to visually supercharge a scene is to add movement. Move camera, subject, or both. It doesn't matter. Any way you do it, the kinetic excitement of motion can make a boring scene seem vibrant and alive.
Case in point: On one of my recent workshop outings, I was shooting at a 300-acre ranch near Byron, CA. The moment the models and I drove up and I saw the tire swing, I knew I could use it to add movement.
What made the photo on the previous page a creative challenge was the way the movement was captured. Many photographers faced with this scene would have set the swing in motion parallel to the imaging plane and panned with the laterally moving model. (That's what I did in the shot below.) Focusing is easy because the subject is always the same distance from the lens. With the correct shutter speed, the result can be thrilling: a sharp subject and a background of streaked motion blur.
But a lateral pan wouldn't produce the dreamlike, vertiginous feel of the portrait on the preceding page. The model, while sharp, seems to sail toward the camera with an energy and sense of three dimensions that lateral panning can't match. Read the whole article here