As the mist rises from Morningside Drive, I ready my camera for zooming around before the rain comes and chases me to CHDK to compress light with really excessively long exposures. I have only an hour or so…
The overcast sky diffuses light into near shadowless, even light in the details, even at max zoom.
Turning to zoom into the house just past Morningside, hey! Is that a camera staring back at me?!
Zoom over to the private school, hey – there’s another one!
Same school, but this one’s watching the first one, which is watching me.
Yikes! There’s one just above me! Already know this one’s dead, though.
It’s not like they didn’t warn me…
Exile cat keeps my “Light Paintbrushes” warm.
Fenix P1D & Bic to Flick.
CHDK Test; 3 Minute exposure @f8. The rain was still lightly falling, but I got some nice foreground fill by playing a flashlight into the trees and grass that would normally be much darker because of the strong backlighting. Still retaining sharp sunbeams, really showing off the … umm, “antibokeh”? of the lens – ie: the optical aberrations that appear when the apeture is stopped all the way down and given an incredibly small amount of overall light, but strong point-lights over a very long exposure time. The color difference between the streetlight and the hospital floodlight suggests to me the Sun and the Moon having a midnight meeting on the hospital helipad.
Another 3-minute exposure @f8, with nice red light bursts from the helipad marker beacons and a couple of cars going past, and flashlight foreground fill, also played against the poles and wires to bring them out as well.
There’s enough resolution @10mp that we can get closer crops from the full frame and start resolving details like the water dripping from the phone lines. Not really sure how those are showing up in such a long exposure – maybe has something to do with light beams shining through the tree branches, consistently lighting up raindrops falling through the beam to create a constant point of light over the whole exposure? Interesting effect that I didn’t expect.
A couple 3:42sec exposures @f8, revealing The Ghost, who mistakenly grabbed the camera 3 minutes into the second exposure and waved it around for 15 seconds trying to figure out why the screen wasn’t showing “Processing” before thinking to slap the lens cap on to record the last couple dozen seconds as plain black.
Who doesn’t love a few seconds of pure chaos slapped onto the end of ten minutes of pure stillness, all compressed into two frames? I’ve got a couple of “light paintbrushes” in my kit: a small but powerful pocket flashlight and a Bic lighter. Those aren’t quite enough to get detail into the far landscape, which the lens, stopped down as it is, should be able to resolve given enough light. I’m gonna need a bigger paintbrush, I think. Maybe find a flashgun and some colored gels. The ghost gets THREE WHOLE MINUTES to splash light where he wants it during this exposure, might as well make the most of it!
Yep, this one was sort of a “happy accident” as Bob Ross might say. There are no mistakes, only unintentional inspiration. :D
Fun stuff, I am enjoying your enthusiasm!