I agreed to host a creative photography workshop for Royston Camera Club and these are the things that I pulled out of what was, to be honest, an extremely difficult location (all the good stuff was far behind barriers) at the wrong time of year (summer) and day (mid-day)…
However, the point was to not expect to take any good images - rather, to experiment with a particular approach and simply observe the effect and learn from it such that in future you might use what you have learned to create something that is interesting.
I took just a 100mm Macro lens and planned to only take hyper-close-up clips of the event.
I failed.
Mostly I played with multiple-exposure in order to facilitate somebody else’s experimentation.
Images:
5-exposure multi with burst-firing. I like this technique as a sort-of long exposure with added texture.
It is fun to change one parameter for different exposures. This is just two exposures of lego figures, one of which is out of focus. I like the effect. Thought that the blurred image may be too blurred, but a re-take with less was not as effective.
Experimenting with blend modes. The previous images used Average, but this uses Dark. It’s not an interesting image, but it was educational to use dark mode to marshal the light in the image around the frame. More exposures would have demonstrated this more clearly, but this is just two, with a rotated camera for one of them.
Burst-mode 9-exposure multi, Average mode. Works well for movement I think. Shame I clipped the bottom of the horse.
Creating shapes with simple forms. 5-exposure (obviously!) using Light mode to keep the tent and lose the sky incrementally. The blurry one is bloody irritating.
Sometimes you just grab an opportunity regardless….
…Or you just like alpacas.
Using Light-mode with 5-exposures though it does look like four to me…. The display was just two columns of candy floss buckets and I moved the camera sideways for each exposure. Rather than create a rectangular wall of floss, the blend mode increasingly allowed the brighter sky to erase the buckets, leaving a scree-slope-shaped pile of colour that I rather like.
Open wide.
My favourite use of multiple exposure is to keep one point static across the exposures, or to follow a particular (usually curved) element to pick it out. This is the Fun House…
…Or do the opposite and just snap in random directions and levels of tilt to portray the chaos of a location.
Using Dark Mode craftily to keep the black-clad BMX riders in front of the bright sky. This and the next one were particularly satisfying because they were jumping away from the sun, so their faces were lit when upside down.
I prefer the first one but this is ok.
If you came to the workshop I hope you enjoyed it. I did not last particularly long in the heat and on the uneven ground..!