Shake!

Shake!

Do you worry about camera shake?

Quite a few years back, before IS lenses arrived on the market, the only anti-shake devices were the brain and good technique. Broadly, most people could hold a camera sufficiently steady, most of the time, at 1/60th second with a 50mm lens on it. 1/30th was a reasonable risk, and some people with steady hands could do much better.

Zoom lenses with restricted apertures made the appropriate shutter speed a rather moveable feast, but then early lens-based IS began to make it easier for those owning the right Canon and Nikon long lenses. In-body systems extended stabilisation to every lens, and there’s no doubt that the technology got better.

But it is still (so to speak) a very individual thing. If you are fit and have steady hands, you’ll be able to hold a camera steady for a longer exposure than I can: and if I forget to take my beta blocker pill in the morning, I’ll lose at least a stop of anti-shake. It’s not just snooker where blood pressure medication steadies the hand! And standards have risen, I think, in many ways, over the last 20 years.

I recall seeing a very precise and methodical approach described in a camera magazine, involving a very small light source and a mirror. I can’t recall the arrangement, but the effect was to double the effect of camera movement. I didn’t try it – in the days of film, it would have been an experiment that took money as well as time and effort. Without EXIF data within each file, you’d need to make a manual record, with pen and paper, of the exposure details for each frame.



But try this. Put a printed page where you can line a camera up on it easily, and take frames at different shutter speeds, starting from two speeds above the ‘One over focal length’ formula – say, for a 50mm lens on full frame, 1/200th second, and reducing until you get obvious blur.

Have a look at the slowest decent frame on the computer, and look for a slurring movement – full stops showing as a short line. Then shoot ten frames at the same settings, and compare them. You may well find that some are not so sharp. This gives you a feel for how reliably you can hold that camera and lens still. If, between them, these have IS, try with it switched on and off. This shows you how effective the mechanism is.

Think about the results you get: if you need to, post a couple of frames in the Critique Gallery. And remember the results when you are shooting for real. When you know that you can’t hold the camera steady at 1/8th second, there’s no excuse for not raising the ISO so that you can use a speed that you’ve got confidence in. And once it’s printed, the camera club judges won’t know what ISO you shot at…