PandTDavis Photo Galleries

The beginning of this week starting out with a day of showers, not quite a good rain, but enough to clear the skies out and give clear views at the lower level in the evenings; it gave the opportunity to take advantage of this for some low light photography. The last two evenings were spent taking advantage of the clear skies and absence of haze at the ground level.

The first set of pictures in the gallery were views over one of the local toll roads at the end of rush hour. A few blocks of walking from the nearest parking area, it was a pretty quiet walk to the overpass to setup and spend 30 minutes just waiting for groups of traffic to coincide on both sides of the road and snap the long exposure.

On the walk back, wanting to rest and let shin splints ease, there was a drainage culvert which posed a good opportunity to combine the low light conditions with HDR techniques. While waiting for the exposures to complete, you wouldn’t think in the middle of a business corridor, that you could be dive buzzed (or more appropriate dive-whooshed?) by and owl. We are not talking a small one either – the wingspan had to be at least the size of a small pterodactyl. Thoughts of “bought the farm” and “left the mortal coil” pass through your mind when you are the only person on the sidewalk along and this monster creature appears almost silently from behind your head. It must have been able to see the distress of the shin splint and thought it has hit the jackpot for a meal.

The next set of photographs stemmed from once back to the vehicle, and knowing traffic was rather light on the surface streets at this time, the camera was rigged up on a tripod in the passenger side seat well. Once sighted in and focused, a remote trigger allowed for kicking off an exposure without having to deal with the camera directly. Since this style/idea of photograph really isn’t going to fit into any hard and fast rule of photography**, there were a lot added to the gallery just cause they came out in some respect. The first trial of these was with a lens without image stability. This set really picked up the road noise (which in CA is going to be large as roads are not at the top of the list for money spent), and gave a dynamic result in the light painting from the street lights and other cars.

A second night of good clear skies and a late work day allowed for a second trial at some of the previous night’s ideas. The Ferris Wheel is at the center of a local shopping center, and while taking photos of it close up will win you a conversation with a security guard, from the parking lot you can sneak views of it towering over the stores. Coupling this with night and the lights it has, you can capture some movement. Once the welcome was pretty worn out with this (reading that as trying not to attract attention of the security truck which stalks around like a scavenger of the desert looking to pounce on prey that pops their head up), the tripod was again set up on the passenger side. This time a lens with Image Stabilization was mounted to see how this would reflect in cancelling out the road noise from the previous night. The results of this last set seemed to show a difference, not a 100% cancellation of movement, but enough to be different enough to have made it worth the second attempt.