Ship's Photographer - Bill Thorsby


Select Photos for Larger View and Item List "Ctrl P" to Print		Looking Fast While Standing Still by Bill Thorsby, Ship's Photographer Editorial Deck Crewmember Welcome once again to the Photo Studio. I'm your photographer Bill, and this month we are going to take a look back at last month's project. I was using a digital SLR to take the pictures and in all honesty because of the equipment I was able to manually adjust the shutter speeds and lens apertures to achieve the desired effect. I then broke out my point and shoot digital camera and was unable to duplicate my results. Why, you may ask? Well, for the most part, I can't adjust any thing but the zoom on my point and shoot camera. But I loved the look and feel of "Speed." Now newer digital point and shoot cameras do have more function controls, but then again my little camera is almost 5 years old. So this month we are going to show you how you can almost duplicate the look of speed, but all on the computer. So boot up your computer, open your Photoshop (Elements), grab a cuppa tea, sit back and let's get started. In photo 1 you will see (yet another) picture of my son riding his four-wheeler. (Yes I took tons of pictures). As you can see the camera has captured the picture and has frozen the action. In fact, most everything in the picture is in focus except for the slight blur in the tires. The first step in doing this project is to duplicate the layer. I won't show this step since we have done that many times before. But working with the now duplicate layer (usually named "background"), we want to click on the lasso tool. With the lasso tool, "outline" the subject. In Photo 2 you can see the boy and his four-wheeler outlined. After you have a complete loop outlined, you want to go to the "Select" tab on top and pick "inverse." What this will do is make changes to everything on the outside of the loop. The tool default is to modify things that are inside the loops. So after selecting "inverse," click on the tab that says "Filter, then pick "Blur," then "Radial Blur." A box will appear showing you a scale that you can slide and as you move the slide you will see the background change to a blur. Pick the intensity you like. Now if you really blur the image background, the inside image will look out of place since it is so sharply in focus. Click on "Select/inverse" to switch back to the inside. Go back and add just a hint of blur to the inside portion. To give you an example, my outside was at 180, and the inside blur was 6. In Photo 3 you can see the result of both sides being blurred and we have picked up the feeling of motion and speed. However if you look closely enough at the picture, the area where the loop was drawn has a separation between the blurs. Well there is a really neat tool to quickly fix this and that is called a smudge tool. In your pallet of tools you will see an "index finger looking tool," that's your smudge tool. Click on that and it will smudge the areas around the lines and blur them in. In photo 4 you can see the results of blurring the picture, inside and outside of our subject lines, and then we smudged in a bit, to smooth things out. I hope this has helped you add that little "Need for Speed" to your pictures. So if you can't capture a good panning shot in the camera, now you know how to do it in the computer. Until next time, remember…. Foremost of all...Happy Shooting, Bill Thorsby billthorsby@ssreflections.com Ship's Photographer Editorial Deck Crewmember S.S. Reflections, Inc. This entire web site © Copyright S.S. Reflections, Inc. Legal Statement LINK TO NEXT PAGE

Looking Fast While Standing Still