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Traditional sports activities images freezes a second in time with a quick shutter velocity. But quite a few photographers with a coveted gig masking the 2026 Winter Olympics are taking blurry images – and they’re beautiful.
Watching the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games, I couldn’t assist however assume that the occasions really feel like each athleticism and artwork. The means that the determine skaters, skiers and athletes transfer celebrates sport in addition to shapes, colours and composition.
Photographs can’t seize movement like movies can. But by blurring motion, photographers are creating a way of movement – the form and sample created by the athlete’s physique, the velocity at which an athlete strikes – in a single nonetheless picture.
Don’t get me fallacious, utilizing motion blur is a technique that’s best used sparingly – and there are a number of fantastic, tack-sharp images coming from the Winter Games. But, I’m finding inspiration in these blurry images – which use a handful of different techniques – that create art from motion.
Panning
While sharp photos feel standard in sports photography, panning is a long-standing technique for sports photographers, particularly for events with predictable, track-based motion. For this technique, photographers use a slower shutter speed, but match the motion of the athletes with the camera.
Tracking the motion with the camera helps keep the athlete somewhat sharp while the background becomes a streak of motion blur. The entire athlete, of course, won’t be sharp.
In this shot of short track speed skating by Tim Clayton, the slow shutter – 1/6 second on the Canon EOS R6 Mark II – highlights the repetitive movement of the skater’s arms and legs. The final result is an image that helps convey the sense of motion and speed of these athletes.
Shutter drag
A flash’s brief burst of light can actually act like a second shutter speed of sorts. The flash’s intense, short burst of light freezes motion much in the way that a fast shutter does. But mix that short flash burst with a slow shutter speed, and you get a photo that is both sharp and blurred in the same frame.
This technique is called shutter drag. The motion during the flash duration is frozen, but the motion while the shutter remains open becomes blur, creating that mix of blur and sharpness.
The featured shot at the top of this article by Alex Slitz is sharp enough to see the concentration and expression on ski jumper Josphine Pagnier’s face, but leaves a colorful blur depicting her movement. This shot was taken with a 1/6 sec shutter speed at f/7.1 and ISO160 on the Canon EOS R6 Mark II.
Fire the flash more than once in the image’s duration, and the motion can be frozen more than once – which is what I suspect is happening with the shot by Patric Smith above, catching Flora Tabanelli in the Freestyle Big Air training.
According to the metadata, that shot was captured with a 1/4 sec shutter speed at f/14 and ISO200 using a Canon EOS R1 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM plus a 1.4x teleconverter.
Zoom burst
The zoom burst is a technique that uses a slow shutter speed with a zoom lens. Photographers slow down the shutter, then, while the image is being taken, zoom in or out with the lens. The result is an image that feels like a starburst of motion.
The technique works particularly well here in this shot by Matthias Hangst, as the zoom burst blurs the flights of the opening ceremony, highlighting the iconic rings at the center. Hangst captured the shot with a 1/8 sec shutter speed on the Nikon Z9 with the Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S II.
A blur filter
I think the blur filter works particularly well for this hockey shot by Andy Cheung. The blur creates the feeling of that rush towards the goal, yet the goal attempt is left perfectly sharp. Cheung took this shot with a quick 1/500 sec shutter speed, using the Sony A1 II and the FE 16-35mm f/2.8 GM II and a blur filter.
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