Experimenting with Motion

My dad once told me that Ansel Adams was a master in the darkroom. For some reason, I have always found that intriguing and the "digital darkroom" is certainly no less challenging. Not to make a bad photograph into a good one, but to use darkroom tools to emphasize what I originally saw -- to me that is mastery. As part of my NYIP assignment (see my last blog), I was to convey motion and although it was never stated, I thought the intent was to capture motion with the camera, not create it in Photoshop so I did not submit the photo shown here. While I don't think it is a particularly good composition, I was trying to blend stop action shots into a piece that would show motion in a somewhat novel way.

We took my neighbor's daughter down to the local playground and photographed her on the swingset. I used HDR Merge in Photoshop and then painted in composites that caught her expressions as she was swinging. All were shot at 1/200 sec, f/8, ISO 100 on the D7000 with the 18-200 Nikkor zoom at 18 mm. I converted to B/W because the color version was very busy, or I should say distracting, and without it, the sense of motion seemed better emphasized to my eye. I would be interested in your opinion on this. To finish, I tweaked up the contrast and overlaid a bit of pattern to give some grain and hopefully to even out the layers. I am still intrigued with this approach and may continue to play with it some more because I still don't have it just quite right: Matching the output to what I can visualize in my mind.

I still have not heard back from NYIP about what they thought of my first results. I am very interested to hear their critiques.

Incidentally, Ben Long on Lynda.com has an excellent course on HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, a link to which is provided on this page.