Worthy?

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...things to do while practising isolation.
During our state of emergency we are not allowed to make journeys unless they are deemed essential. With no active cases of the virus for 26 days now, some of the restrictions have been eased slightly. One of the changes mean that we can now travel to the nearest town for paying bills and shopping for items we can't find in the village. I've not been able to ride for over a month. Trips to the village are too short a distance to be kind to the battery, but now that we can go into the nearest town to pay bills, it is a great excuse to give the bike a run :)

If you are acquainted with the tales of King Arthur, the image will be immediately clear to you. It's made of two separate shots combined together.
The main shot is the motorcycle standing next to a puddle. it's a very shallow puddle, but with the very low camera angle it starts to look like a much larger body of water. And then the rising arm also adds a sense of depth to the water. The other thing that is clear to see here is that I shoot mostly in RAW format, so an unprocessed image straight out of the camera often looks very flat and not very colourful.
View of the same scene from a different angle.
Even though I shoot RAW, I still adjust my settings as if I will only have a JPEG to output. If I process the images using Nikon software, the settings are automatically transferred to my processed images. But since I processed this image in Photoshop® I had to manually adjust the settings until I was happy with how the scene displayed.

The second image is a shot of my arm holding the ignition key. I shot this at home and used lighting to match the outdoor lighting at the scene of the main image. After getting the shot, I cut it out and sized it so that I could position it in the space I had left for it in the main shot.

For the reflection I flipped the image vertically and then manipulated it on my computer to blend in with the water.

To help with the blending I've added a fading blur rising from the base of the arm to make it more consistent to the slight blurring of the water due to the depth of field that you see.

Main Image

  • Location: Stann Creek, Belize.
  • Camera: Nikon DSLR, crop frame.
  • F number: f/6.3
  • Focal length 17mm APS lens
  • Exposure: 1/400
  • ISO: 100
  • Manual
  • Flash not fired



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