Sequence Photography - Composite Photography

For all you sports and action fans, sequence photography is a great medium for capturing action and movement in one image.  It requires some technical skills and post editing, but the results are well worth the effort.

Originally this style of photography was achieved through high speed film camera systems.  The first image taken was by Eadward Muybridge in 1878.  The reason he took this photo was to study whether horse's feet were all off the ground during a trot.

With todays digital advancements, sequence images can be edited into one image.  Recently we have seen the Winter Olympic games and Citibank hired photographer Dylan Coulter and his team to photograph 8 Olympians in their various sports using this sequence method. The results are quite stunning. The following link is a short vid on their process.  http://vimeo.com/86328614

Sequence photography has also been used in portraiture. Asif Tufal, a photographer in South Essex manipulates his images to create interesting family portraits.  http://www.tufalphotography.co.uk/gallery6.html

Personally for me, I don't like this effect with still portraits but I am sure there are many who would like to try this as an alternative process to their work.  I feel that sequence photography is more effective with action such as this image.   www.markoknezevic.com

A nice post editing effect I have noticed is that some of the sequence images have been screened, or lightened.  This softens the effect and gives more depth to the image.

Sequence can also be used to capture the wonderful movements of animals.  You will need loads of patience to capture the animal in different positions however, the results are very beautiful.  I think that zoologist and scientist could benefit greatly with these types of images as they can study specific aspects of the animals movement in one single image.

How to shoot and edit a sequence image:

1. Must use a tripod
2. Choose action that will move across the cameras path
3. Ensure the lighting is varied so that in each image the subject has light falling on it at different angles
4. Turn camera onto continuous shutter.  The more images to choose from the better
5. Batch edit the images in either Lightroom or Photoshop and then combine into one image

The following vid shows a very quick and simple method of post editing in photoshop CS6.  There are many ways to edit sequence images, but I thought this was a very good example of the basic steps but still producing a good result. http://youtu.be/Ax8G2mMCL9o  

Overall I do like this type of photography, especially with action subjects.  It provides the viewer with the whole story in just one image without having to look at multiple images in a sequence like the first image in this post of the horse. I also feel that this style of photography has great potential in other genres such as commercial photography as the following image shows. 

Billie ;)