How to do ICM at the beach

What is ICM?

Intentional camera movement is simply that: you deliberately move your camera whilst the shutter is open to take advantage of the impressionistic effects you can get.

Best settings for ICM

Your settings will depend on:

how much light there is
how fast you can move the camera
how much intentional blur you want

I’ve found that a shutter speed of about 1/2 second works well in normal daylight. That gives you enough time to get a nice sweeping effect at a gentle pace without losing all the detail completely.

In all the shots in this post I didn’t have a neutral density filter with me and I had to work at f22 to limit the light coming in – and then could only really work with 1/25th second which is fairly quick for an ICM shot. Ideally with a 6-stop ND filter I would have been working at f8 and had a better choice of shutter speeds. In this case though I had to really speed up the panning I did to get enough blur. If you don’t move the camera fast enough you end up with an unsatisfactory mess like this:

Try a range of shutter speeds from a full second to 1/20th or so and see how much movement you need to add to get the effect you want.

Histogram

Check the histogram from time to time. It’s easy to get lost in creating the blurred effect you want only to find you’ve clipped all your highlights and can’t rescue them.

Shoot RAW to give yourself the most options in processing.

Which direction to move?

Take spare cards and spare batteries because you can expect a lot of trial and error. Broadly speaking move in the same direction as your subject. If you are including the horizon, keep the camera level. If you are shooting waves, move the camera the same way as the waves are moving.

Don’t do this: I moved the camera downwards instead of keeping the horizon straight

Here I stood over the waves and followed their movement into shore resulting in the central waves themselves staying sharper but catching a nice amount of intentional blur around the rest of the frame. ISO100, f22, 1/10th, 40mm full frame.

This is a shot I don’t think works as well because I didn’t follow the direction the waves were going. Here I twisted the camera instead of panning it. ISO100, f22, 1/6th, 40mm full frame.

What works best?

You need a fairly contrasty scene so the highlights and shadows form the stripes in the final shot:

Not all beach ICM has to include the sea. Turn around and have a look what’s in the dunes. In the following shot I panned quite slowly just to exaggerate the direction the wind was taking the grasses:

DO YOU Need more basic help?

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