Parkour Jump

While walking late one morning in Castlefield, I happened across some guys practicing parkour on the steps leading down to the canals near Liverpool Road.

I happened to be carrying a Nikon D3 and its nine-frames-per-second glory. A perfect (and lucky) match.

I got to talking with them and they were happy to have me do a few shots while they practiced their moves. They were rehearsing for a short movie one of them was making in which I eventually had a role. If you ask me, I nailed the role of "Man on Bench" and I was robbed when I received no awards.

But I digress...

I had never really seen anything like this in person before let alone photographed it, so I was in foreign territory. Looking back on it, there are a number of different ways I could have approached the situation, but I do find this method interesting.

With those nine frames per second blazing through the D3, I opted to follow the progress of this jumper without a tripod. I thought it might convey not only his movement, but also his movement within the environment. I've seen a lot of sequence shots with a stationary camera, but not as many where the camera is allowed to track the subject. I think either way could have worked and I probably would have played with both methods given the time and a more formal setting.

Putting this together in Photoshop is just a matter of getting all the individual photos onto layers, positioning them roughly and then masking off the bits you want to keep or discard from each layer.

www.dsphotographic.com || www.darbysawchuk.com

© Darby Sawchuk. All rights reserved.