The only idea I could think of was to have my daughters wind up their swing and spin around. They each took turns while I perched on the support overhead. As usual when shooting my girls, it was quite a bit of fun, with them wanting to try again and again. The best part of any shoot is enjoying some fun with them.
After 250 shots and several spins each, this was the best image in terms of frame and color. I have some others where you can see their faces, but I actually prefer the more anonymous composition - she could be any kid on a swing.
This'll probably yield my first sub-5 score in a couple of months, but I like it.
My editing intentionally moved away from a real look to an extreme one: major contrast boost, desaturated and darkened the greens, and resized. Sharpening would've brightened up the background, which I wanted to avoid, so I skipped it.
Here's another take from a few months later:
Statistics
Place: 76 out of 156 Avg (all users): 5.3363 Avg (commenters): 7.7143 Avg (participants): 5.1864 Avg (non-participants): 5.3892 Views since voting: 1423 Views during voting: 292 Votes: 226 Comments: 22 Favorites: 1 (view)
Can't stress enough, wonderful composition. Unusual perspective really carries this one. A good photographer also takes multiple shots, and that is what I love here.
looking at the original shot to the processed shot you did a great job, colour and saturation is great, I am not a fan of the set up but i know where you were going with it.
Positives:
Nicely captures the idea of spinning and childhood fun. The blur very nicely shows circular rotation and is its greatest strength.
Technicals:
The background hurts this image. You said, "would've brightened up the background, which I wanted to avoid, so I skipped it". Understood that you wanted the spinning child to stand out. Ironically, though, this may have helped reduced the score more than helped it because the BG is dark and has no interesting detail whatsoever to interest viewers. The BG is more distracting from your subject than supportive.
Overall the image seems dark and oversaturated into the reds and browns. There is a distracting blue speck lower left of your subject. Might be slightly oversharpened.
In motion blur images you want the still detail to be sharp and interesting for the viewer to look at and to provide a solid visual base for them WITHIN the image.
The Challenge:
No question. Meets the challenge very well. Overall technical quality affected your score more than challenge topic.
Suggestions:
The concept is great and you captured spinning very, very well. You just need to work on the technical quality of the image and add more supportive interest for viewers.
Perhaps you could put a blanket or solid colored tarp of some kind on the ground under your subject and add a toy to improve viewer background interest. A complementary color like yellow might work well.
Perhaps you did try and reject this, but a slightly longer shutter speed than 1/20th, maybe 1/10th or more, would work to. Back off on sharpening a bit and perhaps employ noise reduction to make the motion a little smoother. That can be tricky without making the rest of the image look 'plastic'.
I'm impressed. For someone who claims to not understand art, you seem able to cretae it. And judging from your description, it was deliberate. You picked the right picture and you made the right processing decisions.
Even though it's different, I like this quite a lot. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I would twist my swing up all crazy and spin around like that. Color contrast is very nice and so's the comp. good job.
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