As suggested by Ralf I hereby post what I propose as my tutorial for making the photo. Comments and changes are welcome so sharpen your pens and give the tutorial some feedback:


Description for photo ”Running out of time” by Torben Meldgaard

Equipment: Canon EOS 300D with Tamron 17-50mm 2.8

Data: ISO200, F6,3, 1/200 sek. Handheld.

Description: The picture is taken at the Rubjerg Lighthouse in the northern parts of Denmark on august 19th, 2006. The lighthouse is quite an attraction as it is now almost covered in sand.
This particular evening, my wife and I and a couple of friends (from France) passed the lighthouse on our way back from another tourist attraction. It had been raining all afternoon and suddenly the sun broke through. We were late but decided that this would be a spectacular site for our friends to see. As we reached the lighthouse I realized that I would get perfect shooting conditions as there were almost no people around. Usually the place is crowded but I guess the rain had kept people away. Suddenly I saw the runner approaching up-hill from the right side. I had plenty of time to get into position and I just had to wait for him to enter the frame. Luckily his path resulted in a nice composition – all I had to do was to shoot.
Afterwards the picture has become one of my personal favourites – basically because of the composition. It has been published at different internet sites and has received quite a few comments. One of the discussions turned into a debate about the runner. Should he be there or not? I personally believe that the runner makes the picture special. It becomes much more “a moment in time”. Otherwise it would merely have been another sunset photo. The photo gives me that feeling of ”eternity” which is also one of the reasons why I chose the title.
The photo has participated in a competition among Canon employees in Europe. It came in first among app. 750 pictures and I became the lucky winner of a brand new SLR.

PP: As the foreground was quite dark and the sky quite light, I chose to develop a light and a dark version of the RAW file. Afterwards the two photos were merged with a gradient in Photoshop. Colours have been saturated a bit as well.

well done torben i agree the runner is essential. how do you process two images of the same file in raw? i don't understand. i have aperture & lightroom 1.? not 2 & would love to do the same but i just can't figure out how you do this. can you help a pm would suffice.

Gerard,

Maybe I can help? I think Torben has created a light and a dark jpg from his raw file. And then blended the 2 exposures in PS with layers and a mask to create some mild HDR effect.

That is correct! Sorry Gerard. I did not notice your question until now.

I did exactly as Joris said. I also tried to combine them using HDR techniques but I liked this result better.

Thanks for commenting.

Cheers

Torben

This was taken with my canon 5D camera at a dance review my granddaughter was soloing in. No flash was allowed and I was hand holding the camera, so with the low lighting conditions I caught her is a motion . I wanted her turning so I took many shots of this certain pose. This is the one I picked as I had very little editing to do. I adjusted the color and darkened the background. I wanted it to have a surreal feel so the color adjustment was done in a desaturating mode, and then added a sepia photo tent. It was cropped to bring out the skirt's movement. I put a slight turn and transformed her top half to distort it by making her slightly smaller. That seemed to give the illusion of the camera being held at a lower perspective. I changed lenses quite a bit during the whole show but used a Tamron macro zoom most of the time.

well.. i like the dynamic range of this image... i still learn how to make a good dynamic range with my rebel XSi/ EOS 1000D.... such a difficult thing.. but i'll never quit with the gear i have....