For this week’s photo, I’m venturing a little more into the abstract side of things than I usually do. Being that I’m normally a pretty linear, logical, left-brain kind of guy, this kind of thing doesn’t happen very often for me. For those of you who know me well, you might be surprised to see me making this sort of artsy-fartsy kind of image, and to be completely honest with you, I am too!
I made this image this weekend while I was out doing some shooting in Banff National Park with my good friend Wayne Simpson. If you’re wondering what exactly this is, well it should be pretty obvious… It’s a giraffe chasing a cheetah through the snow of course! Ok maybe not, but that’s what we were prepared to tell the passers by on the Bow Valley Parkway if we had been asked what we were looking at as we stood there with our cameras pointed into the trees. Jokingly and in fun of course, we thought we might get a pretty entertaining reaction out of that one, but unfortunately didn’t get a chance to use to it.
In all seriousness though, if you’re wondering what the heck this is, it’s really quite simple. I made the image by panning the camera vertically while looking at a stand of aspen trees. I was hand holding the camera and used a shutter speed of 1/6th of a second and just quickly pivoted the camera down from my eye while the shutter was open. The trick was to start moving before opening the shutter and keep moving after. Other than that it was just a matter of keeping the motion nice and straight and finding an appealing arrangement of trees. While this certainly isn’t anything new or ground breaking, and it’s an image that has probably been done a million times already, it felt good to finally get one of my own that I was happy with. I hope you enjoy it too.