Practice: Abstract Twilight Shots May 6, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Available Light, Contains Images, Night, Outdoor, Practice.Tags: abstract, cars, diffuser, diffusion, long exposure, sunset, twilight
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On the way home last night there was smoke all over the road due to a burn-off (fire hazard reduction) at a nearby nature reserve. I thought it would be interesting to take some sunset photos through the smoke (which would have acted as a diffuser, for a nice red sunset) but by the time I found a place to safely pull up, I was through the smoke! It was mostly behind me, and the light was fading fast – there was no time to walk back up the road to make the shots. The few sunset photos I took weren’t terribly spectacular. However, in one of the shots, a cyclist rode through the frame, leaving behind a trail of light in the captured frame… and that gave me some ideas. I turned the camera around and took some shots of the road behind me!
The smoke from the burn-off caused the yellow street lights to diffuse, giving the air beneath them a yellow hue. I also added a diffusion filter to my lens to make the car headlights turn into brightly glowing arcs of light. The resulting images are quite interesting!
Practice: Commonwealth Place May 5, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Available Light, Contains Images, Gear, Night, Outdoor.Tags: 58mm, commonwealth place, diffusion, filter, glow, Night, Outdoor
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After class on Thursday night, I went out for my usual night shoot, this time at Commonweath Place. I wanted to try out a 58mm diffusion filter with light sources, and a classmate showed me some photos a friend of his had taken at Commonwealth Place that looked really very cool. The diffusion filter spreads out highlights in an image; the stronger the highlight, the more spread out it becomes.
The effect can be seen in this pair of images – the image on the left is unfiltered, and the image on the right is taken through the diffusion filter. Each light source in the diffused image seems to “glow” – this might be a useful effect for my “Shedding Illumination” photos, to create a “halo” effect on some of the subjects. However, the diffused image is also less sharp than the non-diffused one, so I’ll have to be careful using it or I’ll just end up with fuzzy pictures.
