Recently, I’ve been playing with 2nd shutter sync. This simply means the camera flashes at the end of an exposure instead of at the beginning. This lends itself perfectly for capturing motion on longer exposures then effectively freezing the subject at its last position.
A few weeks ago I entered an ICAEW student photo competition:
I decided to use this technique to make it look like I was writing quickly while working on a set of accounts. Unfortunately I didn’t win, I lost to a (admittedly well shot) picture of three meerkats titled Safety in Numbers. Regardless, I’m pleased with my entry:
While out of the country, relaxing in Spain, I continued my experimentation with 2nd shutter sync. This time instead of capturing the final position of a movement as above I tried something a little different…
Playing in Spain
I’ve seen loads of photos taken where people use a light and a long exposure to create patterns or words in the image. I’ve even done it myself:
The problem with these photos is you don’t see who is behind the pattern or the text. In Spain, I combined this interesting type of photo with the 2nd shutter sync to capture the people behind the photo, in the same exposure. Obviously this can be done with photoshop and I have compared the final result for the two methods below.
All of the following are single exposure images.
Due the limited creativity of those involved (myself included) there were no interesting pictures, only names and usernames to be seen, but at least everyone could introduce them in their own way! Apart from the Bez image (which has had the light colour altered) they have only had very basic adjustments made, such as brightness and colour balance etc
These look like they could have been made using composite imagery. As promised, I tried that too:
This is made up of 4 images. Due to the significantly shorter exposure times the body is more clearly visible in the four sections, “person”, “Jake”, “#” and “11”. While there are benefits to creating the image in this way (such as easy retakes of particular sections), the finished product feels less authentic.