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.



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

My Night Work Is Starting To Click

Well I have been mucking about with night photography for a few months now.... I feel like I have gone through the initial experimental phase... I now know how to optimise my camera for the conditions and I have got a pretty good feel on how to read the conditions to capture the effects that I want.

Went out last Saturday night and captured this image.

While there were still some technical aspects that I wasn't happy about with this photo, for the first time I felt that I started to capture the image that was in my head... In my mind that is a pretty big milestone.

I have shot this location before at dawn, but focused on the swirling waves.... this time I wanted the focus to be on the sky contrasting with the gorgeous pool sitting in the blur of the ocean.

I pretty much achieved my result..... at last..... shows that it does pay off to stick with it.

Got a few more images in my head that I'd like to take this full moon.... I just wish the damn clouds would play ball.... it's been crystal clear nights the last few.

Incidentally, this image was actually taken at dusk (15 min after sunset), with a 10stop ND filter on. Sure helps with the composition and focus when there is a bit of light around. I stopped down to f11 and almost 5min for this exposure.

BP

A Night Photography Excursion

Last night my old man, Kajo and I went out for an evening of night photography. This was pretty bullish as it had been raining on and off all day and the forecast was pretty lousy for the evening... but then it beats TV!

We decided to head out and shoot an old abandoned plane that another Flickr member Rob Des had done a nice job of shooting.

The first little problem came when we got out of the car... the ground wasn't just wet, but it was literally a marsh... within 3 steps my shoes were totally sodden.

When we arrived the sky started clearing nicely and we thought we were going to have a great night's shooting. We started shooting this old DC3 and I grabbed this shot before the clouds closed in on us again.





Shortly after this, we had to take shelter from the rain. Luckily the airplane wing provided plenty of cover from the elements.... We killed a bit of time by playing around with some light painting in the interior of the plane.

Once it stopped raining, we went outside and continued shooting, but without any breaks in the cloud, the night shots just looked like day shots. We decided to do some more experimentation with light painting and strobes and while we were learning a lot more about how strong to make our torch light, without scattered clouds in the background the shots just didn't have the punch that we were looking at from night photography. We waited about another 30 minutes discussing everything from the merits of various noise reduction plug-ins to lens recommendations... however finally we called it a night and headed home.



Even though we only got about 20 mins of shooting in ideal conditions, the outing was a lot of fun and pretty educational.