This Good Friday we went for an "outing" (as my ex-flatmate calls it). The weather was actually really sunny, but I had just seen a documentary on Ansel Adams, so instead of cheery and sunny I went for dramatic and black and white. Both pictures were taken with a wide lens (23mm), aperture of f8 (as large a depth of field I could get in this light from a moving car) with a red filter and increased contrast.

This is the last of New York, I promise. Next week it is all back to stories from Iceland. I'm just so in love with the city...

The motion blur effect was added later with gimp using this tutorial. I used a horizontal motion blur instead of a zoom blur and reversed the layer order, with unblurred on top, set the mode to "overlay" and then applied the mask and gradient to it. This is why I appear a bit shimmery, "overlay" basically brightens the bright and darkens the dark colours.
It might have been possible to get a similar effect using slow sync flash and slightly moving the camera from left to right when taking the picture, but I was being the model so I could not test this theory.

I did make a motion blur picture using shutter speed of 1/4 sec, aperture of 1/125 and iso 200, moving the camera slowly from left to right:


And a zoom blur (zooming out) at the same setting:


My dream now is to go back to Times Square with a willing model and a tripod...

Washington and New York were great, but I'm too jet lagged to write much today so instead here is a gallery of black and white pictures of Washington. Use tab to browse through the slide show.