In our recent ‘Colour Burst’ competition, Gráinne Davies came first in Grade A. This is how she made the shot:

The theme of the competition was ‘Colour burst’ so the thinking cap went on as to try to capture something a little different. I have some props at home for some abstract and macro work so I took out my trusty coloured slinky to try to see if I could get any shots to fit the theme. I purchased the slinky on Amazon for a few euro and it’s given me a few good images.

I set up a black background (small black sheet) on a coffee table in a sun room with natural light and set up the slinky in various ways. Key thing here was I wanted to use a slow shutter speed so to capture a blur.

To get this shot I had the camera on the tripod and tilted it downwards so it looked directly down onto the slinky on the black cloth set up in a circle so that it held open and the point of focus was the centre of the slinky. I then used a technique called ‘zoom burst’ where I used the zoom on my lens to create the colour blur. The lens I used was a 24-105mm range so I set up the shot zoomed in on the slinky and then using a slow shutter speed over 1.5 seconds I then manually moved the lens to zoom out slowly and steady until reaching 24mm and the image was captured over the 1.5 seconds. This technique takes a bit of practice to master properly. The slow shutter speed created the colour blur similar to streaking car lights at night.

I shot the image in RAW and converted to JPEG but did very little post processing work as I had done it all in the preparation of my shot so it needed little work afterwards.

Canon 50D 24-105mm lens, f5, 1.5 sec, ISO 100

Well done Gráinne!

See also:
How I took that Shot – Zane Llewellyn
How I took that Shot – Karina Leeson
Competition Gallery
Competition Results and 2016 League Table

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