Krog Street Tunnel in Atlanta

Atlanta Photographers in Krog Street Tunnel

Last week I had a blast out with the Atlanta Urban Photo Walkers. 

We met over at Krog Street Tunnel and walked around the surrounding area getting photos of murals, a copious amount of bikers at a meetup, and light trails and people in the tunnel. 

I go through the tunnel a lot and have taken lots of photos over in that area, but this was particularly fun that evening because I borrowed Lauren's Lumix G95. It has an unusual and fantastic feature called Live Composite. 

What is Live Composite?

Live Composite showed me in real time how my photos would look when stacked in layers. 

That's something I usually do manually in Photoshop but this made it so much easier. 

My usual process includes taking 100s of photos and then looking at them in Lightroom to decide which photos I want to combine. Then I open those photos in Photoshop as layers. 

Then I use different masking techniques to combine the photos. 

The hard part is taking the photos because I never really know how each image might stack with another. It's a guessing game throughout the night and making sure to take enough photos so that I'll get something I can work with. 

It's also a lengthy process because each time I take a shot, I have to wait for it to process before I can see what I captured. While I'm waiting for each shot to process, I'm potentially missing a good shot.  

With Live Composite, I set the camera up and take a shot to make sure I get the aperture and exposure settings right. The camera uses this photo as a background photo.

Once I have the correct settings and the background shot, I trigger the shutter again, and here's where the magic happens. The camera continues getting shots one after the other. The beauty is that I can see the photos stacking as it takes them.

There's no waiting for the photo to process and then wondering what I'm missing. I see the photos stacking up in real-time.

It's a little hard to explain but I had a blast playing with this feature all evening. 

I was able to watch the screen and when I had what I liked, I clicked the shutter button again and the camera stopped taking photos. I did this over and over again all evening. 

I suppose for some people that would be like watching paint dry but I loved it.  

For the above photo, I settled on a 1-second shutter speed with an f-stop of 9 to get everything that wasn't moving in focus. 

I was so pleased with the person walking through the frame! She looks like a ghost moving through the shot because you can't see her legs at all. 

I liked it so much, I put it on the website. I felt like it really captured the frenetic nature of the tunnel.

I've always loved playing with long exposures, especially with busy city scenes. With the cars' light trails and the woman moving through the tunnel, I got exactly what I was hoping to get.

This one I got within one capture session - one background photo and then automatic photos until I stopped it. 

Even with the Live Composite, for some of the other photos I'm working on, I still opened several of the capture session photos as layers in Photoshop and worked on them until I got exactly what I liked. It just made the process of taking the photos less frustrating. 

Would I have been able to do this without Live Capture? Probably, but it was great seeing it happen in real-time and being a little more in control. And I know I got more photos in less time. 

Hmmm...might be time to sell one of my cameras so I can change up to a camera with Live Composite.

Have a great day! And, see you between the raindrops...

xoxo,
Susan

You can find this shot on my site here.