The Humans Are Dead

Two night expeditions last week and I’m just getting around to posting the products. Tuesday, Bill and I made a midnight run through the rural areas just south of town. I think I’m getting a little better at exploiting ambient lighting in these night shots… no lighting the shot with the car’s headlight this time around. Away from town and out in the open, the wind became a problem as can be seen in the motion blurred trees in the shot above.

Friday night’s run was with Jason and his wife Jen. The night was perfectly clear, no wind and a full moon producing an iridescent blue sky. The plan was to head out and retake the photo above. However the photos I shot of the same spot that night, just don’t have the same feeling. Sometimes it’s a one time thing you just can’t repeat… which makes the original shot even stronger for me. But I picked up this shot that reminded us of those anime cartoons where the artwork is super realistic.

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Back to the New Salem Saw Mill for day shots of the wider area to complement the single night shot I posted previously.

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A friend and I went out to visit another friend Sunday night. I knew that the trip to his house would take me past this old Saw Mill that sits on the Sangamon River just outside of New Salem. So I brought the camera with me to try to get a night shot of the mill. The location was much darker that I was counting on. Even 30 second exposures weren’t pulling in enough light. So we had to improvise a little car headlight spot lighting from the parking lot. Not the ideal lighting source but I think I managed an interesting photo. Too bad only one of the shots was usable.

I dug up some of the old film photos I took back when I was in college and scanned them in. They turned out pretty grainy. The photos were already slightly grainy because we were shooting everything with 400 iso film (if I remember correctly) and printing to a matte finish paper (can’t remember what exactly it was). But the scans turned out with even more grain than in the prints. I think my scanner is about to crap out on me. So these are slightly photoshopped for balance and contrast to try to get them closer to how they look in the prints.

View the rest of the set over at Flickr

Things have been incredibly hectic with work the last 3 or 4 weeks. And the problem with writing about work, is it takes away time from actually working! So needless to say, I haven’t been posting anything. It seems like as summer draws to an end everybody realizes summer is almost over and they haven’t gotten project “blah blah blah” finished yet… where does the time go?

I have been taking 30 minutes here and there whenever I get time, to click off a few photos just to try to keep my interest piqued.

The backyard theme is certainly getting tired, but I’m finding a few new things to try back there. I stumbled on to some gorgeous night time photography a couple weeks back, so I had to give it a try. As I was trying to figure out the technique I managed to get a couple interesting shots. I’ve still got a lot of playing to do to start getting good results. But even given my limited experience with night photography (and without the benefit of the dramatic colored lighting) the images can be really interesting. Hopefully I’ll get time soon to work with it outside of the backyard.

A couple days ago I got my first chance to venture out of the backyard with my new camera. I know, I know… cemetery photos are totally “photography 101″. At least it’s not more flowers and I did make some atempt to stay away from the typical cemetery shots on a few of these. I’ve figured out most of the camera features but I’m still getting to know how the camera reacts to different lighting situations. The instant feedback of a digital camera really helps to speed the learning process becasue you can instantly see how something like changing the shutter speed affects the shot. If a shot is over exposed you just trash it, make an adjustment and take another.