UPs and Downs
my up was John&me,interesting image, but couldn't see any actual motion in it,even though I know people were working.
Down ...Gidders, loved your image, always very creative.

Ups & Downs

Up - Trena's Playing Trains - I do like this idea. If had been me I'd have been tempted to add a bounced flash to give a crisp image & balanced the ambient light exposure to give the blur... I did this for my shot & I'll do a behind the scenes to explain what I did.

Down - Graham's Slow Rotation - loved the idea, great sky, spot on choice of shutter speed... If I was looking to make it even better I'd maybe have tried a shot moving a bit to the right to separate the building from the right hand windmill, and a square crop to eliminate the tree leaving just three turbines. That said, you got my vote :)

Here's my up and down

Beach At Night - What looks like a shadow in the bottom right hand corner spoiled it for me. Apart from that, a nice image and milky water.

Ghost In The Machine - Really good idea, well composed. Suited the B&W conversion.

Behind the Scenes

I know you lot think thats all my work is done in Photoshop :) but in this case it was all in camera :D

The challenge was to get the movement in the match striking & the hand holding the match, while getting a crisp image. I set up one of my studio strobes, with the modelling light on full power to give the illumination for the blur to the hand/arm moving. This metered at 1 sec @ f8 and I've found that about 1 stop under exposed gives a nice semi transparent blur hence the settings of 0.5 sec @ f8.

Flash exposure power was dialed in to give the correct exposure at f8. The other challenge was to set the flash to fire on second curtain - for some reason I couldn't get this setting with external studio flash... so I fitted my EX580 on minimum power, selected 2nd curtain sync, pointed it at the slave cell of the studio flash to trigger the main flash.

Et volia - lots of effort for no votes... but the main thing is that i enjoyed creating the image :cool:

Sorry for the delay in commenting, I've been without a connection for a few days. My 'up' is Clive with an excellent production (as ever - and thanks for the explanation), it looked good and didn't deserve to be without votes.

Ade G posted the ball of moving light in the churchyard. Same about the white-out in the right centre, but I'm sure it couldn't be avoided in the real world and it certainly represented the slow-shutter theme very well. In fact ...I was that voter!

Graham