Last weekend a local fundraising event presented a new challenge, that of capturing a sense of movement in a still image but without using motion blur. It's one of the fundamentals of photography, I suppose, but one that I've not run into before.

Normally with a violinist or drummer, for example, you convey motion by having their hands blurred. But this musician, Alistair Anderson, had a very distinctive style of performance that involved him moving his whole body quite dramatically, so blur wasn't going to work. I tried a few alternative ideas and the one that worked best was turning the camera slightly to throw the background out of line, and taking the shot when he made eye contact with the audience.

For another shot I wanted to focus much more on the connection between Alistair and the audience, so that meant getting right over to one side and down low, to completely remove "us" (the viewer) from his field of vision, so as to minimise any sense of him looking at us. Towards the end of one performance he held eye contact with the audience for several seconds and that produced a shot that worked to some extent, although not quite as well as I would have liked. There's a similar shot with more of a smile, which you can see in the gallery, and I expect many people would prefer that one, but it's obvious that it was taken when the performance had actually finished and that wasn't what I was looking for.

Click here to view a gallery of unprocessed shots

Alistair Anderson