Time for another Photo of the Week. This time an Aston Martin taken during the public grid walk before the Britcar 24 hour endurance race at Silverstone. I’ve published images with this ghostly crowd effect before but they are generally created from multiple exposures aligned in Photoshop and layered with stack modes.
It would have been much easier to use that technique on this day as the sun was bright and the car was wrapped in reflective silver vinyl but as I had my tripod and ND filters with me I decided to do it “properly”.
Even with my ND filter in place (I think it was a 6 stop filter) I had to drop my ISO to 50 and stop down to f/20 to get around a 3 second exposure. A nice side effect of being at such a small aperture is the starbursts on the cars highlights.
Ideally I’d have liked a little more blur in the people, but under the bright conditions, with the gear I had, 3.2 seconds was as slow as I could go.
What really lifts the image for me is the fellow photographer lunging in from camera right for a quick shot.
Love this effect and the car too. I have never thought of doing a long exposure of crowds, its really interesting.