An Attempt at Star Trails

Over the weekend, I wanted to try and experiement with Star Trail images but I wasn't sure if that would be possible with all the rain we had at the beginning of the weekend. However, at around 5:15am on Sunday morning, the cloud cover broke enough for me to attempt this new project. I only got one image that night, but I do like what I got:

I attempted to try again on Sunday night/early Monday morning, and the first image of the night I took didn't yield any star trails at all. I took a second image and I did get trails, but I think that the image would be a little more interesting if I had a clip of a tree in the image somewhere to give the image more of an anchor.

I hope to test out some more star trail images sometime this week. I would like to see if I can get a darker night sky in the background to really make those star trails pop more. Each of these exposures was about an hour long. 

Here are the previous three images with a little bit of tweaking in Picasa 2:

 

 

A Look at Poi

Fire Dancing

Above is a video of someone doing a freestyle poi show. What poi is is basically dancing with fire. All the videos on the right that are vids of people dancing with glowsticks, well, they were mostly inspired by poi people. I have here a few pictures from a few years ago that I took at a friend's grad party where her brother and some friends did a poi show for us.

 

Hopefully, if I can get the materials and the people coordinated, I plan to go to the beach again sometime this week and play with light dancing, star trails, and maybe sparklers (since no one I know is trained in poi).

Eli Whitney

Yesterday I took a walk down to the Eli Whitney museum to see what kind of water shots I could get. It was still a little too bright out to get the really smoky effect that I wanted with the water, but I didn't have a car at the time and I needed to make sure that I would be back to Albertus in time for work. In any case, I played around with long exposure times to see how I could effect the light in my images. I discovered that I could give my images a really ethereal look if I got the exposure time just right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really like this image; I have decided that some time I will have to try coming in in the very early morning and see if I can get a good shot of this building with mist around it because I think it would look very cool.

 

 

 

 

I also really like these last two images because I like that I captured the image of the trees in the water. 

 

 

Beach

These were taken a few days ago out at the West Haven beach. I was trying to capture that smoky effect that water can get when you do a long exposure. I believe the exposure times for all of these images was around 25-30 seconds a piece.

 

 

 

 

Eventually, I asked James to step into my images again, this time armed with a flashlight instead of a cigarette to see what kind of light trails we could get if he swung the flashlight around. I really like these next three images a lot because I had started to get into what other people have started calling "light graffiti". I'm really interested in trying more of this stuff out, and I think I will have to experiment with glow sticks and sparklers, if I can find them.

 

 

 

  

James also had me look up videos on YouTube of people dancing with glowsticks on strings. I put up a video bar in the top right of the blog so you can also view some of these really cool videos. I think it would be really cool to take long exposures of people dancing with glowsticks.

Experimenting with "Ghost" images

Here I tried experimenting with multiply images of myself in one image. I know that technically, in order to get clear images of yourself doing different things in one image you are supposed to take all the images separately and then layer them in Photoshop, but I wanted to see how this would turn out. I like the really "otherworldly" aspect of having myself and myself in one photograph. It makes the image seem more surreal.

 

 

North Haven Fair 2009

These images I took at the North Haven Fair. There was a small trapeze act, so I decided to try out some long exposures there. I like the man on the bicycle the best, especially when you can see several of him in one shot. I also like how the girl in the hoop looks like a ballerina. She's very delicate looking.

 

 

The ferris wheel was easily one of my favorite objects to shoot because the lights on it were constantly changing. Every time I took a picture of it, it was like seeing something new.