A couple weeks ago I posted about a technique that I was testing on capturing motion blur.  Today I'm going to post about a different technique to achieve the opposite effect.  This technique is about using a fast shutter speed to stop (aka: freeze) motion.

So, the other night I was home alone and really wanted to play with my new tripod and 430EX II Canon Speedlite :)  I decided that taking photos of myself floating in air would be a fun thing to do, so I mounted my camera on the tripod and put on a wide lens.

Unfortunately I didn't have a place to mount my flash off the camera, so I had to mount it on-camera.  In order to prevent the typical flat, DMV-style photos, with hard shadows, that you get when using an on-camera flash, I bounced the light off of the white door behind the camera.  Notice the nice soft shadow in the corner?

The first image was shot with a shutter speed of 1/50 sec whereas the second one was shot at 1/5.  Notice the light trails in the second image?  This is due to the slower shutter speed.

Even though the first image properly stopped the motion, I didn't like how over-exposed the window was.  I decided to shoot at an even faster shutter speed to reduce the available light that was coming through the window.
Using 1/200 did just the trick. :)

You can view the rest of the images on the Stop Motion - Jump! page.