The Koi Pond

A week or so ago, I, along with a local photography club, was invited to photograph a Japanese Garden. Unfortunately, the presence of so many people at once made photographing any vista-type images difficult. So I decided to concentrate on a small area where there weren’t many photographers…..shooting directly into the koi pond. But, since my consuming interest is currently abstract multiple exposure imagery, I had to figure out how to use those techniques with the pond (on top of which I somehow forgot my polarizer).

I decided to have a go at high-speed burst multiple exposure photography yielding (after processing for contrast etc. in Photoshop) the following image:

“Koi” © Howard Grill

For this technique, you set your camera’s frame rate as high as it will go and adjust your ISO and aperture so that the shutter speed for each individual frame is high (preferably >1/500th second). The most frames that can be captured as an in-camera multiple exposure in this fashion with my camera is 9. Thus, I was able to capture 9 frames in very rapid succession, with each individual component frame being sharp. The images were combined in-camera using the ‘Average’ blend mode (needless to say, in the last few months I have learned a great deal about in-camera blend modes and white balance during multiple exposures). Using the ‘Average’ blend mode often leads to a low-contrast, low-saturation image, but contrast and saturation are easily restored in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Similar to Intentional Camera Movement imagery, you have to take a lot of images to get a good one. So I’m not showing you the other thirty or so that didn’t work out :)

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