Redwood Impressions

I spent a damp and grey day crashing through the brush down in Southern OR, and N. California scouting for some potential spring redwoods shots. I had been kicking around some ideas for "out of the box" photos; and with all of the talk lately about realism, artistry, and emotional impact on my mind, i spent a fair amount of time testing some of them out.

I know a zoom blur isn't really groundbreaking territory, but I'll bet I am the first person to do it in infrared combined with Marc's condensation trick! This is 90% in-camera. I lightly blended in a non-zoomed version for some of the FG detail, otherwise it got too crazy looking. Other than that, not much PP.

I'd appreciate any thoughts you may have on the overall feel and idea behind this. I know It's not everyone's cup of tea.

Let 'er rip!

Cool, I am watching for Luke Skywalker on his rocket sled. Nice blend idea.

WOW... very unique shot Aaron, I love it. I'm not familar with the "zoom blur" technique you used here, can you direct me to how I can find out more about it? I will try the NPN index too.

I have one suggestion for you. Rather than sharpening the entire image equally, try selective sharpening (employ an edge mask of sorts) as it may help to reduce some of the "jaggies" in the streaks and thin branches.

This is great, the zoom blur is great as is the blended exposures. It gives the effect of rays of light coming from within the forest. Very nice and a unique image.

Pretty cool looking. Nice job on the specifics. I agree, the zoom blur did what you wanted it to. :-)

Very cool Aaron, looks like a sonic blast is tearing through the forest!

Wow, that's a duzy! I love it! Very creative and technically excellent. Good idea about blending in another image; the fg looks fantastic. Beautiful work!

Looks futuristic. I would like to see the original shot posted here.

I love the idea of this Aaron, but the hard edge of the trees (where i assume you blended in an exposure) looks a little over-worked to me for some reason. Perhaps what I'm seeing is just a side-effect of sharpening the rays of light?
Nice composition and exposure throughout, and interesting use of the IR filter. Very creative shot Aaron.

Great shot Aaron. This is definitely out of the box and it works really well. I love the light efffect this creates. I'm guessing a dualtone sepia conversion?

I like Jamie's idea.

This is really fantastic. Great idea and execution. This is what I call creativity! :)

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.

Just to clarify about the zoom and blending - what I did here was make one exposure at 24mm that was just a basic IR shot. It was in the neighborhood of 2 seconds. Then I took another shot with the same settings but zoomed out to 12mm about halfway through the exposure. I thought that by delaying the zoom, I could get a solid base of sharp detail that would feather off into the blurred streaks. It took several tries to get it right, and worked pretty much as I expected. The only problem was that the small details were totally wiped out, and that's why the blend. Any jaggies or weird edges are just an effect of poor sharpening on my part. There was no complex masking or tedious postwork done at all. Probably less than 10 minutes total work in PS. Attached is the delayed zoom frame for comparison.

Thanks again for the comments.

What technique did you use for blending? Just Normal blending mode with reduced transparency, or a different mode? Which layer was on top?

Cezar - I used the "lighten" blend mode with the zoom layer on top of the normal exposure. That took care of most of the work, then a few low opacity brush strokes to mask out the zoom layer for the FG and main tree trunks.

Bryan - No fancy conversion. Just a channel mixer adjustment layer set to mono, and then a hue/sat layer with "colorize" checked for the sepia toning. I use duotone quite a bit but sometimes I do a quick test with a hue/sat adjustment layer to see how it works as a toned image. It's much faster than messing around with the duotone controls and is non-destructive to the image. It looked pretty good to me, so I quit while I was ahead.

Thanks again for the replies. I hope the info helps. You guys all owe me big time for letting my secrets out.

A+ on the creativity Aaron. This turned out great.

Interesting concept played out well. I think I prefer the consistency of the second offering.

A truly amazing shot using creative techniques for awesome results!! Geeze Louise I'm GROOVIN on this one!! This should be posted in ESS cuz it could EASILY win an EP!!

I really like this shot. I like the exposure blending because it keeps the whole frame from being out of focus and helps draw your eye in. Without that focus I find my eye not knowing where to look. I've tried the zoom blur trick several times but always found I didn't like having everything out of focus. I never thought about taking a separate shot like this and blending the exposures I'll have to try this sometime.

beautiful work Aaron!!! the rays are stunning!!!