This was actually a bit of a throwaway image. I had just finished a night walk with some others from a local photowalk group and we had finished up at City Hall. Someone asked me to watch his gear while he went to use the little boys room and so I plopped my tripod down and starting fooling around with the shutter settings while waiting to see if I might get a handle on what would work. As a result, I ended up with the following image.
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| Original |
I liked the composition of the moving skaters and the people sitting down who are frozen and of course the arches overhead with the stars hanging down. The problem with the image is that it's misbalanced and there's a lot of distracting elements. So I ended up cropping out the left hand side to remove the building and the garbage receptacle.
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| Cropped |
A little better. One thing I didn't like was the second person from the right was moving at the time of the image which caused her to blur a bit. I thought of trying to sharpen her up and define her edges a bit more to make her look more static-y, but I still think the image is a bit lopsided. With the guys sitting on the bench, I thought it would look a bit better if there was only one person on either side of them so I ended up just removing her completely. I then adjusted the orientation a bit. I gave some thought to trying to paint the lights into the second arch, which weren't working on that day, but it started to look a bit unnatural so I let it be. I did paint in a bit of the light which were missing in the first arch on the right hand side of the image.
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| Final Image |
If I had to do it again, I would have repositioned the camera a bit to the right. The stars are lopsidded because of the parallax angle which would have allowed a much more symmetrical image. Looking back through the images I took after this, it appears that I did try to reposition the camera, but the shutter speeds were too long and the skaters were too much of a blur. This was a 2 second exposure so it worked okay.
