Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Playing with Shutter Speed, Week 2

This week's assignment was to use long shutter speeds in night photography. We didn't have any other specific instructions. So I decided to do one "traditional" shot and one showing moving lights.

On the way home for class last week, I spotted the fantastic neon sign shown below. I went to the restaurant three times to take photos. (The sign wasn't fully lit up the first night that I went out.) Thankfully, no one came out of the restaurant and told me that I couldn't take photos.

Pappas_top3_r.jpg

For the second photo, I wanted to get Houston's downtown skyline in the background with streaks of light from car headlights and taillights in the foreground. The challenge was finding a place to take the photo. I knew I had to find a bridge close to downtown that had a sidewalk large enough to set up a tripod and didn't have an obstructed view. Unfortunately, I don't know the roads around downtown very well because I don't like to drive there. But fortunately, I found this photo on Flickr and was able to blatantly rip it off. Here's another version where I got more headlight streaks than taillight streaks. The headlights are a bit too blown out.

skyline1_ps2_r.jpg

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think I'm seriously in love with that bottom picture.

knitseashore said...

That is so cool. I hope you frame some of your best photos to enjoy in your home! I'm hoping to do that with some of Chris' photos of our bike trips.

Elizabeth said...

Yes, better with more red streaks and less headlights. Cool stuff. It sounds like a great class.

Meghann said...

oh, very cool!

Jennifer said...

You are taking some amazing pictures!

Anonymous said...

Great shots! I like how the yellow and red in both pictures echo each other. You could do a whole montage of Houston at night anchored by those two images.