This is why we do what we do

This was up on Dancing Shades of Light before that site died last year. I was idly looking at stats on flickr and I discover it’s still the most viewed photograph I have there, now 1500 views plus. I remember when it hit about 800 and I thought, fantastic, nothing is going to beat that ever.

Looking at it now I can see various technical issues – I hadn’t done that many of these, and actually, this is still the biggest one I’ve done. Depending on how many frames you’ve got and and far off the end of the zoom you are they take a greater or lesser amount of time to complete. I think this took about 4-6 hours. It’s still the biggest I’ve done.

It was shot with a 50-500mm zoom lens and stitched together painstakingly in Photoshop. At the time I didn’t use layermasks much (although I use them ubiquitously in the photomanipulations now turning up on the DigitalFX site) and I didn’t have a graphics tablet. The big challenge with this too was the sheer number of frames. I think I had 23 separate frames to glue together. The ones I did before typically maxed out at 12 and because the time lapse between frames was twice as long, there tended to be more space between the kitesurfer in each frame, so less painstaking painting to be done across bits of body, lines, bar, board.

It got a huge reaction at the time. Typically, when Eamon saw it, he pointed out the imperfections on the kitesurfing front. Kite not low enough.

The second most viewed shot on the flickr stream is this one:

which was done sometime later for Francois. While it’s probably technically a better stitch, I had no room to straighten the horizon and so for me, it’s always the one that could have been the greatest of them all.

And I lost a frame out of this one some how.

When you do something like this for someone who doesn’t see it coming, their reaction tends to be great. That reaction is what makes you do it again, and again, huddled over a computer, lining up horizons, trying not to swear about where a wayward hand lands versus a brightly coloured board.