I’ve been playing around with the camera on the Samsung S5 and it’s been producing some pretty nice shots. But one of the features I was most interested in was the Shot & More Mode. This mode allows you to apply several effects to a shot, such as Drama Shot, Panning, Eraser, Best Face and Best Photo. Before I describe them, let’s see how Shot & More works.
It’s actually pretty simply in concept. Firstly, it takes several pictures over the course of roughly 5 seconds. It then takes those pictures and applies the various effects against them using assorted masks. Here is the original:
Let’s start off with Drama Shot which I think is probably the most fun. It allows you to have multiple instances of a person in the shot at the same time. It’s best used for when the person is doing something entertaining and moving across the image.
If there isn’t enough distance between the subject in all the photos, or if they’re coming towards the camera or going away from it, it most likely won’t work. There would just be ghost images overlapped one another. But when you get it right it will look very cool. I would imagine it would be great for people doing tricks on bikes, skateboards, rollerblades and even parkour. Or if you just want to catch your kids going wild in the park, you’ll probably have a great shot to pull out when they bring a date home in 10+ years.
Panning is a pretty cool effect too. If you don’t know what panning is, think of those car ads where the car is tack sharp but the background is all blurred as if it’s speeding by. That’s what this effect will do. It uses a mask to select the person and apply a little motion blur to everything else. You can even select the direction of the motion blur with a little dial on the screen. This is what that looks like:
This panning effect has a lot of impact when you first see it. And the person your shooting just really pops off that screen. It works really well on the screen but if you were to blow this up to a larger size you will start to see spots where the mask isn’t so tight against the person and some of the non-blurred background peeks through.
There’s a couple of more effects I will address in a later post but I just want to end with this. The Shot & More mode is automatic, so that means you shoot your scene and the camera decides what effects you will be able to apply. This can be very frustrating as you try to do some of these because you have no feedback as to why the captured image wasn’t good enough. All I can say is keep at it and for the above to effects have as much movement across the screen as possible to get access to these two. Well, go out and get crazy and have some fun. Or better yet, have your friends go crazy and you record it for all to see.
About Dov Plawsky
I am an aspiring freelance photographer and writer. I've always enjoyed the story around the picture and now want to expand upon that. I founded Beyond Your Bag to help share knowledge across like minded people and to hopefully connect those people to one another.
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