First "serious" PP attempt

[bobscape]

I wanted to capture the activity of people going to work from our local train station. The key element of the shot was to portray movement. The movement of the people on the platform, and movement of the train itself. Being early morning and low light, the time exposures I was using (typically 20 to 30 seconds) required a number of individual shots to be taken in order to build the final composition. The first shot was of the people milling around the platform, the second was the train arriving which gave me the red lines from the lights. The final was of the train stationary.

All images were captured a RAW format and converted to TIFF files through Canon Zoombrowser. I composed the final image through PS version 5 as follows:
I started with the platform and people shot as the background, I pasted the stationary train over this first image and then pasted the moving train as the final layer. Switching between the tree layers, I then selectively removed areas to expose the detail in the underlying layer. To finish off I adjusted the opacity to give a translucent appearance to the train.

This is my first “serious” attempt at PP though I’ve played around with the program on many occasions. It was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot about the software. What do you think?

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e337/bobscape/Transport/_MG_1423morningtrain.jpg

[sando]

Maybe if you compressed it a touch, you could post a bigger pic? it would be easier to see that way :)

[StewartR]

To my eye it looks pretty good from a technical point of view. However, I'm not sure that the balance of the tracks and train is right. It's a sort of neither-one-thing-nor-the-other mix. What woud it look like if you made the train more transparent, as if it were more ghostly? (And perhaps the people, too?)

[Dorman]

Interesting concept and I like the way the final image turned out.