Motion blur/perception of movement

[gahspidy]

Hey all, I've been asked to work with an artist, David Kassan on his self portrait. He is looking to work from a photograph of himself that has multiple images(3-5) depicting motion with at least one of them being fairly sharp.
He was specifically looking for motion/movement. He also wants these done against a white wall in his studio (that is the hard part)
The images I took here were from a few experiments using strobe multi burst lighting. No modifiers used, I was just trying to work on the actual effect . He also specifically wants one light source from above.
In the first image tried using a constant light from a halogen head with the addtion of a flash set with rear curtain sync and a fairly long shutter speed. I did not gel my flash to match the temperature of the halogen, which I will certainly do next time. I will try to use this constant lighting with a multiple burst of three flashes next time around as well.
Here is some of what I have achieved so far, very preliminary stages.
the last image with myself in the frame 5 times was done against a black bg which really works best as the black records nothing over the faint signals of motion and blur.
Please don't be alarmed by the images of myself. . .Nina will kill me if she finds out I posted her for an example lol
Any other ideas to achieve the motion blur results?

[Asylum Steve]

Gary, I'll skip right past the idea of you collaberating with someone on their self portrait and simply say what you have so far is pretty cool. It's really hard to give advice on this kind of project because of the experimental nature of it and the fact that there are so many variables.

So I'll just say write everything down as you try different combinations. The worst thing that can happen would be to stumble upon a great result, and not be able to recreate it when you need to...

[gahspidy]

Thanks for your reply, Steve. Yeah, it sounds a bit odd I guess to be working with someone else on their self portait but he is looking for an image of himself from which to work from. I'm quite honored to be working with him, he is an incredible talent and a heck of a nice and personable guy. Check out his work here
I'm finding it almost impossible to get any blur or motion effects against a very white bg. The signals from the faint images of motion get washed away by the stronger signals recorded by the white wall.
It seems that he is flexible and so hopefully he will be happy with something from the session this Friday.
Yep, you are absolutely right about writing the settings down, because I find that the slightest change between aperture, shutter speed and flash output makes big differences in the end.

[Asylum Steve]

I know what you mean about the odd collaboration. I once photographed a performance artist, and she ended up entering the image in a self-portrait gallery show. It was kind of weird, but I understood. What she was expressing was her self-portrait, and I helped her capture it on film...

[xystren]

When you did these was the subject moving or was the camera moving?

They are very intriguing and looks like something I would like to experiment with.

The only other thing I have seen that provides some other sort of motion, is changing the focal length throughout the exposure. I have yet to have any success with it, but some pictures I have seen have been quite interesting. It can give that kinda "going to warp speed" look. How well that would work for something like this I'm not sure.. I suppose panning while changing the zoom with multiple flashes from a strobe could be interesting.

Regardless, very cook looking pictures/effects.

[gahspidy]

When you did these was the subject moving or was the camera moving?

Greg, these were all subject motion. The one that I like most, the second one up from the bottom was created by my subject Nina moving side to side while I zoomed in during long exposure with three strobe bursts at about a 3hz frequency.

I like it because it also seems to convey forward motion and gives a greater sense of depth, I think.

[xystren]

Greg, these were all subject motion. The one that I like most, the second one up from the bottom was created by my subject Nina moving side to side while I zoomed in during long exposure with three strobe bursts at about a 3hz frequency.

I like it because it also seems to convey forward motion and gives a greater sense of depth, I think.

All of them are great... I'm going to have to give it a try. My g/f was looking over my shoulder and was asking "what is that" (she always says that when she sees something that piques her interest) so I was explaining it to her. She really liked it.

Now I guess I am going to have to try this out some more.

[reidsprincess20028]

Those are cool

[jetrim]

Gary, just bouncing thoughts here, but why not shoot your subject on a black background and overlay it onto a shot of the white wall by making a layer mask from the shot on black? This way all the black becomes transparent without any loss of detail from the the motion, and the white wall shows through everywhere there is no detail to cover it up...

(this is the way it was often done in the days of film)

[gahspidy]

Gary, just bouncing thoughts here, but why not shoot your subject on a black background and overlay it onto a shot of the white wall by making a layer mask from the shot on black? This way all the black becomes transparent without any loss of detail from the the motion, and the white wall shows through everywhere there is no detail to cover it up...

(this is the way it was often done in the days of film)

I'm going over to his studio in a few minutes and was throwing some of these ideas around. He liked what I showed him of the experiments, which are these that i posted. His intent is to replace the wall/black bg with a textured background, so, it really does not matter as he will be layering and working on whatever we come up with in PS.
So , when we speak and get to work on it it may just be that we shoot against the black for the best image effects and then he can do what he wishes with them later in post processing.
I'll let you know what happens and what we come up with.

Thanks