A simulated tracking shot is generated from an image sequence in which a foreground feature moves relative to a background during capturing of the image sequence. The background is artificially blurred in the simulated tracking shot in a spatially-invariant manner corresponding to foreground motion relative to the background during a time span of the image sequence. The foreground feature can be substantially unblurred relative to a reference image selected from the image sequence. A system to generate the simulated tracking shot can be configured to derive spatially invariant blur kernels for a background portion by reconstructing or estimating a 3-D space of the captured scene, placing virtual cameras along a foreground trajectory in the 3-D space, and projecting 3-D background points on to the virtual cameras.