Composite photos - action sequences

[Oracheski]

I'm not sure this fits exactly into this forum, but it seems like the best one for it. The goal was to show the action of the hurdles at this elementary school sports day with a composite image. The only problem is that I hit on the idea of doing this AFTER going to the track meet, so I didn't have my tripod with me. Because of that, lining up the photos was going to be an issue - at least until I hit on using the stick as the center point.

Using PhotoShop, I stacked the images as layers with the bottom one at 100% and all those above it hidden. One by one, I made the layers visible, reduced the opacity to 50% (or less, depending on the image) and used rotation and movement to align them.

With the images aligned, I was left to puzzle out how to get them to fit together. First I had to eliminate extraneous images. Shot with the Canon Mark IIn, I wound up with too many frames to use so I weeded out those that didn't fit the flow.



Once I'd eliminated some frames to find a good balance, I had to erase around him cleanly enough to have the overlay not be obvious. I wound up inserting yet another layer, 100% black this time, to use as a background for the selection and deletion process.

I used the same techniques for this later project.

I used PhotoShop for both projects, available thanks to work, but if you don't have that available I'd recommend GIMP, a free photo editor.