ABSTRACT

A sorting table in a tea factory. As with many factory-industrial scenes, the photographer’s problem is trying to escape the “annual report” look. I needed the scene for a book, but how to make it more interesting? In fact, the hand movements were deft and rapid; just watching the actions repeated over and over again was slightly mesmerizing. A cinematographer might have considered undercranking to give a jerky, sped-up treatment. To get something of this hyperactive flavor in a still image, I locked the camera on a tripod and shot many frames. From these I chose a-few-to-several positions for each hand and brushed them in selectively, using a stack of layers in Photoshop. From start to finish this took 144 seconds, so you could say that this is simply a still snapshot of a possible movie sequence.