Jerardo Arciniega: When I saw this week's challenge I knew I wanted my photo to be of a race. Unfortunately I was under the weather most of the week and therefore didn't go outside much. Because of that, I decided to do a race with a few toys I had. I set up the Lego Mario and Luigi next to a finish line and pushed a toy car behind them to create the blur.
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Nikon D3100, AF-S Nikkor 18-55mm lens, ISO 200, f/5.3, 2 sec exposure time.


S Raghavendra Kopalle: Camera - Canon 1000D
Lens - Rokinon 8mm Fisheye(manual)
ISO - 100
Exposure Time - 4sec
Aperture - f/8
Story -
Antithesis ~ In life the best moments seem to go off in a bustle where as the toughest seem to be frozen. The pic captures the converse.
S Larry West: Canon EOS Rebel T2i
Canon Zoom Lens EF-S 18-55mm (Kit Lens)
ISO-100
6-Second Exposure

I'm still new to having a DSLR, so having a chance to really have fun with the exposure settings was a real treat! Well, almost. I wound up not being able to shoot this until Sunday due to a snowstorm. I wanted to capture just how busy Philly is, so I stood directly in the middle of Broad Street. For about 30 Minutes, I braved near 20 degree temperatures without most protection, and it wasn't until the end I got the shot I wanted. At one point someone started eying up my camera, which had to be the most hazardous part of shooting this, frostbit be damned.


S Tracy Miller: My day at the museum. My friend and I needed to get out of the cold, so we decided to take his challenge inside. We spent the day at the National Gallery in DC. I shot this with my Canon Rebel T3i using a 50mm lens with a 3 second exposure at F11. My ISO was set at 2000.
SMelanie Zavala: Taken with a Nikon D3100, standard lense, f16.0, 20 sec. Playing Moonlight Sonata.
SBob Zimway: I really thought this might be an easier contest for me as I've been doing a lot of long exposure shots during daylight recently. but man, people move much faster than you think.

I was in morro bay this weekend and there was a farmer's market happening and I really thought this would be a great opportunity to find a subject and setup my tripod and camera. I wandered around looking for a good candidate and this woman had a very interesting "hat" (I'm still not sure what kind of animal it represented but it had ears and was fuzzy and the "arms" had pockets for her hands although she didn't always use them in the shots) so I asked her permission if I could photograph her while customers hovered explaining that she would need to keep very still.
she was quite skeptical at first but I convinced her I was on the up-and-up and took about 60 shots overall. this is the best that came out because a) people move really fast in 3 seconds and b) my subject would tend to move and c) a lot of shots had people between her and the lens.

camera: nikon d3000
exposure: 3 sec
aperature: f/22
focal length: 35mm
iso: 100
nd8 filter


SPeter Welch: This photo was taken in downtown Puerto Vallarta, Mexico looking over the boardwalk out to sea. We were enjoying a beer in a open-window seat at a bar across from the famous "Sea Horse" statue (a symbol for the city). The balmy evening attracted a crowd of tourists mixed with local families, and a small group of street dancers had set up some boomboxes for their performance. I only had my Casio Exilim point-and-shoot, and no tripod, so I balanced the camera on the window ledge. Using the camera's built-in "night scene" setting, the shutter stayed open about 2-3 seconds.
S Jeremy Klukan: Seattle has an amazing skyline, and there aren't many vistas that beat the view from across Elliott Bay in West Seattle, looking directly toward downtown and the famous Space Needle. My subject here, however, is the cargo ship in the bay. Other ships kept floating past it, and in this 20-second exposure, they gave the stationary vessel a "warp speed" kind of effect (the black and red blur is actually from another similar ship). The long exposure smoothed out the water, including the waves splashing up against the rocky beach, and give the ship a sort of surrealism. Lucky for me, it wasn't rocking back and forth, so it's actually in focus, and the city at twilight creates a nice background for the scene.

ISO 100, 20-second shutter, 0.0 ev exposure, f/22 aperture in shutter priority using an 18-55mm kit lens with a ND4 filter at dusk. Edited in Photoshop to crop, perform a bit of spot healing to remove a blurry dust particle, and add a vignette.


S Daniel Grossmann : Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 (focal length: 17mm, F-number used: f/18)
ISO: 100
Shutter Speed: 2.5s

Not much of a story behind this... came across the photo challenge, was out buying shoes in a rather busy store (usually is on Saturday) and so I gave it a whirl, deciding to make the shoes my frozen objects while the people around me blurred away.


SRobert Newitt: For this weeks challenge I enlisted the help of a friend to be the frozen person. I went into the city of Leicester and my friend bought a new board which I thought added interest to the shot. We found a spot which looked busy and took a few captures.

I chose this one because I like the colors which the blurry people are wearing which contrasts with the blue skateboard.

Using a Canon 500D 18-55mm lens. I shot for 2 sec at f/8, ISO 100. I used lightroom to tweek to files.


STony Castellani: The Equipment:
* Nikon D7000
* Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-S DX VR ED lens with included hood on
* Tiffen screw-on UV filter
* Tiffen screw-on circular polarizer filter
* Tripod
* Turntable
* Chiffon throw blanket
* A small box
* Statuettes
* Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

The Settings:
* Exposure - 3.0 sec at f/11
* Focal Length - 24mm
* ISO 100
* Manual mode
* Flash did not fire
* VR off
* Auto-focus set to AF-S
* Captured in RAW

The Technique:
* I set up a turntable on a platform with cloud-filtered afternoon sunlight angling directly at the setup. I placed my camera on a small, pocket tripod on one side of the turntable, and arranged the subject on the other side of the turntable. I set the camera to timer mode, triggered the shutter, and then slowly walked the turntable in a circle while the camera went through its cycle. It took a few tries before I found the correct shutter speed, since rotating the turntable produced a significantly different light level through the course of the rotation, but eventually settled on 3 seconds. I chose this particular aperture because I knew that the motion would sharply separate the subject from the nicely blurred background, so I felt free to choose a large f-stop to both ensure the entire subject would be in sharp focus, and to allow a slower shutter speed to provide for a greater blurring effect. Post-processing was performed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, and involved some fine-tuning of the various elements of the exposure, cropping to the contest dimensions, and a touch of vignetting.

The Story:
* As I was considering how to render a subject in sharp focus while blurring the background, I noticed a turntable in my kitchen, and realized that if I put both a camera and a subject on a turntable and spun it during a long exposure, I'd have a perfectly blurred background and a perfectly sharp subject in the same frame. After a few tests under a few different lighting conditions and locations, I settled on the soft, cloud-filtered afternoon sunlight coming through my kitchen windows as the source. I tossed a chiffon throw blanket over the turntable, elevated one section with a small box, and positioned a couple of figurines as the subject. I realized that the movement of the turntable would completely separate the subject from the background, so I chose a large f-stop so as to render the entire subject in perfect focus, knowing that the motion would simultaneously render the background as a perfectly smooth field of blur. It took a few tries to get the shutter speed and technique right, but eventually I figured out the trick of walking the turntable around at just the right speed, and settled on a shutter speed of three seconds. I also had to work out what range of backgrounds to represent in the picture, because over the full 360 degrees of possible rotation, some segments of background were better than others based on the layout of my house.


SChris Ondrus: I decided to take the challenge and photograph a busy intersection close to my house. My thought was to use the stop sign as the subject matter and since light does not stop and it's continuous I thought this piece would be an interesting contrast. Since we are located in the Washington DC area, I was surprises no one asked what the hell we were doing taking pictures at night in the middle of the street!

For the tools and camera settings I have a Cannon EOS Rebel and I used a 30 second exposure with the default ISO. The hardest part was focusing the camera on something so could get the camera to take the picture (remember it's dark out).


S Trey Mortensen: I took this shot outside my apartment Friday night as I was waiting for a friend to come over. I had done a shot similar to this a year ago and I wanted to practice it again with my own gear. I tried using an external flash, but because the only flash I have is my mom's Nikon (yes I know it's like having a Chevy engine in a Ford body or vice versa), I don't know the specs of the flash. Funny enough, as I was taking this, some girls walked up and asked if I did photo shoots. So moral of the story is to have your camera out in the open and people will find you.
Shot with my Canon T2i with 28-135mm lens. 50mm length, 2.5 sec, ISO 100, f/4.5
S Diego Jiménez: Have you ever taken a 5-year old with a sugar-high to Ikea? ...Right... Don't!

I tried a few shots with my 'models' standing in front of moving crowds at the store; but this shot was much more fun to me, as it told a (very familiar) story to us. I hope one day my niece will remember the days when she would NOT stop jumping in beds, spinning, dancing and chatting... ever.

Canon T2i, ISO 400, f/22, 3.2 secs.


RJ Carrillo: Canon 5D Mark II. 17mm-40mm 4.0L. Shot at f/10.0, 2.0 seconds, 100 ISO up close with a tripod

Shot in Times Square, New York. It was the only way to make them "stand out" amidst a sea of tourists. The only instruction given to the couple: "hold a kiss for 3 seconds.". They happily obliged.


SBenjamin Lanon: The Underground Rush. Once again this Gizmodo shooting challenge comes at the right time. I've been wanting to take a picture of rush hour in public transportation for a while but never thought of doing so with one subject standing still. So I asked my friend to help me out while I shot this photo of her in Saint Lazare station in Paris. This place is pretty bad to commute through because people walk in all directions at the same time. I thought we were going to experience a lot of trouble, but we actually struggled having a constant flow of people walking by... Several elements are representative of the Paris metro here: the man blasting music in his headphones, the big scar the girl is wearing on the left (it's cold), and the cheap beer can probably left here by a homeless.
Canon 5D @28mm, f/11, 2.5s, ISO 100.
S Ron Evans: Equipment: Nikon D700 using 50mm f/1.4G and Promaster ND4x neutral density filter. Exposure is 5 seconds at f8. ISO 100.

I dropped of our teenager daughter and her friends at the mall. I was hanging out reading emails and listening to music on my iPhone. Waiting for girls to finish their shopping isn't a big deal anymore because all that I need to entertain myself is on my iPhone. Like most people who are glued to their smartphones, it's really like the world was going on around me and I don't even notice.