A friend of mine from Edmonton shoots wedding stills with his Canon digital cam. I can't recall which model but it cost him about $4000 Canadian. He also has 4 lenses for it. Anyways, he showed me a neat trick. You set the shutter at 1/4 and use the flash. As soon as you click the pick, you quickly turn the cam upside down, or a complete 360 turn. When you turn the cam like this (quickly), the light from the flash smears for an interesting effect. Just thought I'd share this. :)

Frank,

That is a neat trick. I think I can help you understand what is taking place. By moving the camera quickly when shooting a stationary subject you are essentially making a pan shot of a stationary subject. The smeared portion of the image is created by the ¼ second exposure, which is long enough for the ambient light to be recorded on the image. The light from the flash creates the portion of the image that still appears to be sharp. The average on camera flash duration is a 1/10,000 second burst of light. That is fast enough to record the part of the image that is not smeared, even though you are moving the camera.

Steve

Thanks for the explaination. I saw some of his examples. He told me that you can also do this with film. Never tried it, though. I have enough trouble with triple exposures. :)

You can also do this effect in Photoshop as an FYI, (not to down play the camera effect =)

I messed around with this the other day. I got some cool shots of a classic Canon EF body with a 50mm lens. I pumped up the sharpness and saturation and some of the shots look pretty trippy.