Saturday, June 14, 2008

Shutter Blending

OK, So most of you have probably heard about exposure blending... blending multiple images of various exposures together to manage the dynamic range in a scene.

Well for a while now I have been thinking a lot about what it is I love about long exposure photography... and it is the contrast of the movement and motion of clouds or water against static items like rocks, or pools.

Luna Park Shutter Blend experiment #1

I've been thinking about how to apply this to non-traditional scenes and I have come up with a technique that I call shutter blending. I'm sure others must be doing this, but I haven't found anyone using this technique.

Intead of blending images of different exposures, what I want to do is blend images of the same exposure, but with vastly different exposure times (shutter speed). I'm doing this through a set of ND filters (3 stop and 10 stop).

What I plan to do is take a series of images of a scene with a fairly high shutter speed until I get a person (or group of people) that I want to make my focal point, and then take quite a few shots of blurred people moving and clouds wizzing past and then blend them all into a composite scene... thats what I'm calling Shutter blending.

If anybody finds examples of others doing this type of photography, I would appreciate the links.

BP