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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First I got 2 chairs and positioned them a few inches apart and lay the glass from a picture frame across the gap. Then I laid some coloured paper on the ground below the glass. I placed a table lamp on the ground with the light shining on the coloured paper. Next I filled a clear glass bowl with water, poured a few drops of oil in the water and placed the bowl on top of the glass. With the camera positioned on a tripod above the set up I got to work. I took lots of shots with different coloured sheets and wasn’t happy with the colours I was getting. It just wasn’t vibrant enough.
The annual display has been ingrained in the memories of countless people who, as children, were brought to see the pyrotechnic wonder. One woman in her eighties recalled, as a young girl, trying to see the display from a hill many miles away while this writer saw them first about 50 years ago for the first time.
This year’s crop of youngsters couldn’t wait for the display to begin. Their first countdown from ten started about 10minutes prematurely and was quickly followed by another about five minutes later each one finishing with oohs and aahs of disappointment when nothing happened! Not to be deterred, they started another which finished just a tad prematurely this time and was followed by the inevitable audible disappointment. However just as their disappointment was at its height, the first rocket screamed skywards instantly changing the mood of the kids to screams of excitement!
ECCG were stationed right around the display from Whitepoint to Fort Davis and some really nice colour bursts were captured that have all been posted in our gallery of the event.