Photographic happy accidents...


Maybe accident is a bit strong, but these images did turnout better than I had expected.

This past weekend I traveled to New York to shoot a wedding that was held on a beautiful property that sat right next to a pond.

At dusk Tiki torches on the island in the middle of the pond were lit.

During some down time, after the sun had dropped significantly below the horizon but while there was still a bit of a glow behind the trees I thought I would do a bit of experimenting.

I wanted to pull in as much light as I could through the shutter, but also knew I could not hand hold the camera that long, so I dragged a small table to the side of the pond, set my camera on it, started playing with shutter speeds, each time gently hitting the shutter button (so as not to move anything) and let the camera do the rest.

The first image has an exposure of 1.6 seconds, the second image has an exposure time of 2.5 seconds, because the shutter was open for so long you can see that the water is smoothed out and the clouds are not tack sharp.

The ISO is also high so you might see just a bit of noise.

What you see is how they came out of the camera (other than RAW conversion).

I will edit them a bit more and will likely choose one for printing.

The purpose of this post and showing you these images is to encourage you to experiment, go try something different.

Heck, it's digital and won't cost you a penny, the results may be good, maybe not, but you wont know until you try.

Feel free to click on either image to view larger.




2 comments:

Miguel Palaviccini said...

Very nice accident indeed! I would have loved to see a 10-20 sec exposure for the extra blur. Would have had to lower the ISO.

Anonymous said...

Oh wow...2 great shots! I especially love the first one.