Up & Down or Side to Side?

In my “Movement in Photography” talk I mention the difference it makes to an ICM image if you move the camera in one direction, compared to moving it at right angles to that direction.  Information at right angles to the direction of camera movement tends to get spread out, whereas information in the direction of camera movement is accentuated.  Take these tree images as an example:

In this first image I have moved the camera, (my mobile phone – 2 second exposure), in generally the same direction as the tree trunks.  Although there is a bit of horizontal information, most of the image is of near-vertical shapes and textures.

In this second image I moved the camera from right to left, and you can see that the vertical tree trunk information has almost completely disappeared. The horizontal branches that were pretty well invisible in the first image are now much stronger.

Remember this tip when you do your own ICM photography.

The apparent vertical lines in the second image are an artefact of how the phone camera combines a series of short exposures to give one longer exposure.  The lines are exposure gaps where the camera is dumping an exposure to memory then starting a new exposure.