This is a pic of my friend Steve doing some fire twirling at another friend’s party. Steve is becoming a fine twirler and he’s a willing participant in my photography experimentation. In this shot, Steve tried to keep his head as steady as possible while I composed the long exposure. Next time I do this, I might try and set a rear mode flash and see what that does. I do think though that the flash will take away some of the mystic and surreal-ness of the image. Normally for experimental shooting, unless it’s something really special, I won’t research it to death first. I will give it a go and just see what happens – then I tend to do a breakdown of the shot and research what I could add/do different next time.
Morning Cuppa
Here’s a little experiment with the Brenizer method. The shot is comprised of 32 images using my 50mm 1.8. The basic premise is to try to recreate a massive frame, very wide aperture shot from any lens capable of less than f2 – the lower the better. It is simply a panoramic shot wide open at a close(ish) subject. I’ve got some stuff in the mail, so more to come on this – the little nifty fifty isn’t the best lens for this job, but it was what I had for the experiment, and over-all it didn’t turn out too badly. It did take me 3 goes though – it’s difficult to get the overlaps right to avoid holes and jagged joins.
There was an issue creating the image with Microsoft ICE whereby the table was misaligned and the glasses were all messed up. I used Hugin to create a second panorama, then used masking and distortion in Photoshop to recover the image. If there was much more misalignment I would think the image would be unrecoverable in any reasonable amount of time.