Spin

At a local park, there are these "spinning seats" that I've thought would lend themselves to a nifty layered composition. I've had the idea for a while but not had the opportunity to shoot it, because the park's usually too crowded. Yesterday, unexpectedly, I found myself watching Bug and Fairy Girl play there for 30 minutes.

The seats are thick molded plastic, shaped vaguely like a three-petaled flower. They're set on a 3" metal pipe and spin freely. Under normal circumstances, this would be no different than your run-of-the-mill bar stool, but the pipes themselves stand at a 5-10 degree angle off vertical. The kid's upright weight causes the seat to rotate to try and achieve equilibrium, but this moves the kid out-of-balance, so they shift to regain balance, resetting the equation. The seat can get to spinning very fast very quickly--eventually the rider either sets their feet down to stop or they tumble off. I'd never see one either, until they redeveloped this section of the park about six month back. Pretty ingenious, if you ask me.

I didn't have my tripod, but as I had my camera I figured I'd give it a shot and maybe test out the "proof in concept." Hand-holding as steadily as I could, I shot about a hundred frames of my daughter spinning on the seat. I chose four and put them into layers in Photoshop, varying transparency and erasing where necessary. The hand-held shots didn't line up that well, but I cropped and erased enough to fake it.



It doesn't look half bad at this size, but when blown up to pixel-resolution it's obviously a rough hack-job. Still, it shows me that the idea has some merit. Now to just find the time to head back over there with the young 'uns when the park ain't crowded...

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