Today’s Post by Joe Farace
May is notable for several reasons. It’s the month of my birthday (it’s the 21st, in case you were wondering), its also National Photo Month.
May also the month of the Indianapolis 500! The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy 500 are synonymous and while I have yet to see that race in person, although I was able to photograph the penultimate US Grand Prix at Indianapolis a few years ago. This is how I made my favorite image (below) from that race.
How I made this shot: The photograph of Michael Schumacher driving a Ferrari F1 car was made either during practice or qualifying, I don’t remember which one, during the 2003 US Grand Prix. It was captured using an Olympus E-1 Four-thirds DSLR and 50-200mm Zuiko Digital f/2.8-3.5 ED lens. The camera has a 2X multiplication factor so the lens had the equivalent angle-of-view of a 110-400mm lens. The Shutter Priority mode exposure was 1/1000 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 200, while I was standing on the roof of one of the garages at Indy.
Schumacher won in the rain but I never got as a good of shot of him actually winning the race. So I decided to use the image I did have to create an impression of that win ala LeRoy Neiman.
I applied Photoshop’s Watercolor (Filter > Artistic > Watercolor) and then the Poster Edges (Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges) filter was used to give the image an even more artistic look.
Then I applied the Motion Blur command ((Filter > Blur > Motion Blur) but instead of using the kind of blur that follows the direction of the car, I made it more vertical with a forward slant to provide a more impressionistic touch.
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