10-Seconds - Tunnel Vision - Behind the Scenes

[leek]

When thinking about the theme of the last competition, I thought that many people would opt for a nightscape, light trails, strobe images or light paintings so, being me, I decided to try for something that was a little more out of the ordinary...

My first thought was that instead of letting the subject move, what would it look like if I let the camera move against static objects????

My first attempt was during daylight hours and was predictably overexposed:



This wasn't terribly good, so I quickly came to the conclusion that I would need a situation involving less ambient light...

At the time, I was driving back and forth to my work location, driving through several tunnels, so I thought that these locations might fit the bill... My original concept was to try to capture the hypnotic effect of driving through a tunnel, capturing the tunnel lights and walls whooshing by the camera...


While doing this, it occurred to me that it might be fun to match the speed of a nearby car - thereby rendering an image that might be recognisable as a car against the moving lights and walls of the tunnel...



Not bad - I thought... but I'm sure I can do better...

After a few attempts, I managed to capture an image where you could almost pick the type of car... As I said in the description attached to the photo, this involved closely matching the speed of the other car over 200m at 80 km/h...



I played around with the saturation levels and arrived at my competition entry...


I must admit that I laughed when Trent (MCWB) published some pics from Belgium the next day and patented the term inverse panning, coz that was exactly what I had been trying for... In fact I made a comment that it was a shame that he hadn't done it for 10 seconds to enter the competition

I was a little disappointed with my overall ranking in the competition (20 out of 28 )
However, I enjoyed creating something original and personally thought that the eventual image had a sort of impressionist feel to it...

My image obviously polarised opinions in the voting and the "Excellents" and "Very Goods" were more than cancelled out by the "Not my cup of tea" and "Well it's a Picture" votes...

So, in short, after the last two comps... I've learnt my lesson for the next one...

Keep it simple... Don't experiment...

[PiroStitch]

Leek I know exactly how you feel as that was my train of thought as well With long term exposures I knew it was pretty much down to the normal landscapes, waterscapes, ghosts, light-trails, etc with a tripod.

I opted to go tripod free for mine Obviously my pic didn't do it for the masses either Ah well.