Learning to Walk: 'Sequence in Time' Project

The brief for this project was to take a series of images showing a sequence of movements, and blend them together, thereby creating one image. I had great visions in my mind of capturing someone running along a beautifully sunny beach with sand dunes in the background, but as ever, my difficulty in finding time and travelling to locations got in the way! I'm still hoping to do this, but in order to practice the technique, I've gone back to a series of images I took a couple of years ago, even before I'd registered for the OCA course. I'd never processed the images before now - they'd just been sitting on my hard drive unused.

I had a montage of this type in mind when I took the pictures, but was less experienced at the time so didn't plan it properly. I did get as far as setting the camera to manual, to ensure the depth of field, white balance, focusing distance and shutter speed didn't change, but I didn't have a tripod, so they were taken handheld.

Here are three of the six initial shots:

As you can see, the composition isn't too great, and I hadn't really thought about the background. However, the lighting and focus were consistent, and this made the blending process incredibly simple.

I opened the six shots as six layers in one Photoshop image. I used the 'auto align layers' command to ensure they were accurately placed. I then reduced the opacity of the top layer and erased parts of it to reveal the figure and shadow in the layer underneath. Then I bumped the opacity back up to 100%, merged the top two layers together, and repeated the process until all six layers were merged.

Finally, I used the 'clone' tool to do some minor 'tidying up', where the layer didn't quite match, and made some levels, curves and sharpness adjustments. Here is the final image, which I cropped to panoramic format:

Initially, I tried leaving the people in the background in shot - however, they weren't adequately spaced out between shots, and just looked like an indistinct mass! Instead, I therefore erased from each layer, so that the sea and sand showed through instead.

I definitely want to try this again, now that my photography skills are better. This time, I will ensure that the composition is better, and that the background is more suitable. I wish I knew someone who could do a cartwheel, that would make a great sequence!