I thought I’d tell you how I managed to create the montage called Wipeout, which made the cut as Day #195‘s image.
I was at the South Bank for my 366 Flickr Group’s meeting. We had spent a pleasant couple of hours at the pub enjoying a pint and watching the world go by, then we took a stroll towards the QEII hall. There’s a section under the concrete walkway which is popular with skateboarders and roller blade fans, and their antics always draw a crowd.
The weekly theme was “motion”, so I decided to switch to motordrive for a sequence of the skateboarders riding a block of concrete. This was what I ended up with:
Having loaded all four images into Photoshop, I copied the last three images as new layers into the first. Then, selecting all 4 layers, I used the Edit -> Auto Align Layers option and Photoshop tweaked them all so that the concrete block and background appeared in the same place in each. Then, it was a case of using Layer Masking for each of the top layers, so as just to show the skater and board from each, while the background remained from the original image.
The main background picture (below) gives us the first skater and most of the background:
The next frame moved the skater and board along a bit, with the rest of the background masked off:
Then frame 3 shows us another view as he’s running off to the right:
Finally, the skater disappears out of the frame.
With all four layers turned on, the final montage is quite effective. All hand-held, with not a tripod in sight!
