Fortnightly Challenge - 5th Mch to midnight 18th Mch - Slow Shutter Speed

[Tugboat]

UPs and Downs
my up was John&me,interesting image, but couldn't see any actual motion in it,even though I know people were working.
Down ...Gidders, loved your image, always very creative.

[Gidders]

Ups & Downs

Up - Trena's Playing Trains - I do like this idea. If had been me I'd have been tempted to add a bounced flash to give a crisp image & balanced the ambient light exposure to give the blur... I did this for my shot & I'll do a behind the scenes to explain what I did.

Down - Graham's Slow Rotation - loved the idea, great sky, spot on choice of shutter speed... If I was looking to make it even better I'd maybe have tried a shot moving a bit to the right to separate the building from the right hand windmill, and a square crop to eliminate the tree leaving just three turbines. That said, you got my vote

[DigiDiva]

Here's my up and down

Beach At Night - What looks like a shadow in the bottom right hand corner spoiled it for me. Apart from that, a nice image and milky water.

Ghost In The Machine - Really good idea, well composed. Suited the B&W conversion.

[Gidders]

Behind the Scenes

I know you lot think thats all my work is done in Photoshop but in this case it was all in camera

The challenge was to get the movement in the match striking & the hand holding the match, while getting a crisp image. I set up one of my studio strobes, with the modelling light on full power to give the illumination for the blur to the hand/arm moving. This metered at 1 sec @ f8 and I've found that about 1 stop under exposed gives a nice semi transparent blur hence the settings of 0.5 sec @ f8.

Flash exposure power was dialed in to give the correct exposure at f8. The other challenge was to set the flash to fire on second curtain - for some reason I couldn't get this setting with external studio flash... so I fitted my EX580 on minimum power, selected 2nd curtain sync, pointed it at the slave cell of the studio flash to trigger the main flash.

Et volia - lots of effort for no votes... but the main thing is that i enjoyed creating the image

[graham harcombe]

Sorry for the delay in commenting, I've been without a connection for a few days. My 'up' is Clive with an excellent production (as ever - and thanks for the explanation), it looked good and didn't deserve to be without votes.

Ade G posted the ball of moving light in the churchyard. Same about the white-out in the right centre, but I'm sure it couldn't be avoided in the real world and it certainly represented the slow-shutter theme very well. In fact ...I was that voter!

Graham