It has been too long since my last blog post. I took a short trip to Phoenix to visit some family and watch a couple of Spring Training baseball games which kept me away from my blog. However, I had a fun experience this past Friday evening that I wanted to share. A friend of mine, Becky, has been bitten by the photography bug. She primarily likes to go hiking and shoot landscapes. Her landscape shots that I’ve seen are really quite good. However, she saw some of my light trail shots from downtown Los Angeles and wanted to learn how to do long exposure shots.
To help her along, I brought my tripod as she has a small portable tripod, but not one large enough to stand up all the way so that we would not have to crouch down to make photographs. We went to the 3rdStreet and 4thStreet bridges over the 110 freeway (which is generally the “go to” spot for getting some good light trails) and started practicing.
Over the course of a little while she learned to shoot in shutter priority mode so that she could lengthen or shorten her shutter speed to intensify or dull her light trails. As the rainy weather had just ended, we had a clear sky without any smog or atmospheric haze. The shots came out quite well. Becky got light trails similar to the ones on the homepage and in my other blog posts. She even managed to have a driver stop his pickup truck right next to a road sign for merging traffic. She had a long exposure that made the light trails quite pronounced while the truck and the sign were perfectly tack sharp. It was a great shot even though I could only see it on the screen on the back of her camera.
While on the 3rdStreet bridge, Becky turned around and began shooting north so as to get light trails from a bending freeway onramp in addition to the freeway underneath. At that time, there was some traffic moving on 3rdStreet and she managed to “ghost” a car in her image as well.
We had a great time doing some long exposure shots and making photos with light trails. I also explained to Becky that the same techniques work when shooting streams and waterfalls to give that silky-smooth appearance to the water. We also discussed making an outing to the beach when the weather warms up some (I know we live in LA so it’s never really cold, but it’s cold to us) so that we can take some shots that smooth out the water or make the spray from the waves turn to a misty and moody type of shot.
All in all, it was fun to get out with a friend and get to shoot some interesting shots. It was also fun to actually be able to share some knowledge and experience with someone as they learn to express their art. I look forward to shooting with Becky again and both teaching and learning new techniques.
Happy shooting. Feel free to comment below.