I had always wanted to photograph a cheetah running at full speed, which is about 70 mph. I wanted to freeze the action, which required a fast shutter, but at the same time show horizontal blur to imply movement and speed. When I finally had the opportunity, I chose a shutter of 1/1600th of a second. This rendered the cat very sharp except for the tips of the paws. The problem, though, was the background was also sharp. I didn't like that because the defined bushes and trees made the background busy and distracting. Had I slowed the shutter, the cat wouldn't have been sharp. So, I took several motion blur shots of the same landscape with shutter speeds between 1/8 and 1/40 to see how much blur would look good behind the cheetah. I chose the blurred background shot at 1/40th. I then combined the blurred background with the image of the cat in Photoshop. This composite shows the beauty and the detail of the cheetah plus the implied movement as revealed by the abstracted landscape. This is exactly what I envisioned. I shot this with a 300mm f/2.8 Canon telephoto.
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