Day 2 :: Playing

The concept behind todays photo for this week of daily photos, was to be playing an older style or board/card game but with a little participant movement to make the playing aspect obvious. Getting the board/game in sharp focus but having moving hands was easy enough with a long exposure and the camera on a tripod but moving the hands during the exposure. I took a couple of images but decided I needed the hands to be recognizable not just totally blurry. I though a bracketed set and HDR processing might be perfect but it look that surreal unnatural (and a little sinister) effect HDR so often suffers from.

It was not hard to reset the three EV steps back to roughly the same exposure, then I used OnOne’s Layers module to blend the three images according to the amount I wanted to either highlight or blur the hands and then merge them down using normal Blend mode. A final run though  dynamic contrast and finally cropping.