Today I bought a new tripod to replace the one that I had been using. I wanted to try it out on something so bad, but did not know what to use as a subject. I wanted to shoot something at night that was colorful, but could not get a good angle on anything. That is when I thought back almost three weeks to when I tried to shoot the Lafayette skyline from a pedestrian bridge at night. Next to the bridge is a nice little skating rink for the public. I had already had my picture that night so I decided to save the rink for another night. Tonight was the perfect time to finally get back to the bridge. I picked a vantage point a little higher up in order to get everything in the shot. I really wanted to capture the motion with a blur effect so I tried a few things. I set my aperture all the way up in order to shoot a longer exposure that was correctly exposed. That produced an image with only a couple people in it. Anyone who had been moving just vanished into thin air. I basically then spent the next few minutes slowly opening up my aperture so that I could shorten my exposure time. I worked my way all the way up to the max that my camera would allow. I ended up liking this picture the best. I think that the people stayed still at just the right time in order to give the people in motion a little perspective. It was fun seeing exactly what the camera can do. The purpose of this blog is to learn something, and I think I accomplished that tonight. As usual I tried an HDR shot as well. The composite shot looked good, but when I tried to do anything to it the sky had way too much noise in it. Luckily I actually took the time to take a real picture so that I did not come home empty handed as I did on New Years Eve.
I talked about the new tripod that I bought early on in this post. I finally bought one that would stand up straight, and it appears to be of a very fine quality. In addition to being a tripod it has a center section that comes out and extends as well to give me a nice monopod. I can’t wait to try this out at a football or baseball game. Now that I have a good tripod I can finally take the pictures that I have been wanting to take.
Dave Wegiel Photography 