LightningPaul

The flying boy hanging on ropes... lots of fun. You may think he is a bit disabled. After all, his arms are twice his body and his legs are shorter then his head. Though I can tell you he is perfectly healthy. The long arms are due to the perspective (I was photographing very close) and his legs are bent to avoid touching the ground, so you don't see them here.


TECH-INFO: on many photography sites you see similar images so I wanted to make one myself. The perspective is great but the background not. I made a mistake of using a too short shutter speed. Normally I'm not in favor of this but I decided to motion blur the background in Photoshop.

First we must make a mask to cut out the boy and ropes. This is remarkably easily with the quick selection tool. Only a few corrections had to be done. I was surprised myself. For blurring the most straight forward idea is to use the mask to select everything except the boy with ropes and to apply the motion blur filter. Unfortunately the edges around the boy will look very strange because something was missing (or cut away). The only way good way I found is to reconstruct the background behind the boy. So I made a layer copy, then cloned the sand and bushes on of the boy. It doesn't need to look smooth or great at all (it may even be very messy) because it will blurred anyway. Finally I put the original image on top and applied the mask to keep only the boy. Now the background is fully blurred just like in real. Finally I enhanced contrast and colors, and added some vignetting.

This is the fourth posted image in portrait mode in a row, seems it is not a coincidence anymore :-)