Experimental Photography

On the way back to the campground after dinner in Salmon, Colin looked up on the hillside and spotted a great photo opportunity. It was a horse silhouette at the top of a hill as the sun was setting in the west. We both lunged for our cameras as I put on the brakes and pulled off to the side of the road.


When we got back to the campsite I prepared a campfire for what would be our last marshmallows of the trip. Then, Colin and I decided to try some photography at night by leaving the shutter open for long periods of time and using flashlights to "paint" various subjects. This is really fun because you never really know what you're going to get. Looking on the LCD is exciting because you can capture some really surreal images. And the beauty of digital photography is that you can just experiment to your heart's content and delete all the ones that didn't work out.

The first one below I call "Ghosts for Obama". After opening the shutter, I painted the car with the flashlight and then Colin jumped in the frame and I painted part of him too. Since I was constantly moving and not lit up, the camera did not pick up the image of me. The squiggly lines are pieces of the light trail from the flashlight I was using.

Colin took the photo below with his camera. I painted him in three different locations at varying distances from the lens. Colin opened and closed the shutter with his remote control.

We experimented with this painting technique for quite a while - lots of fun! Then, we ended the night by trying to get some star tracks. The following photograph was created with an exposure time of 30 minutes. The trees were lit up by the firelight which was about 20 yards away. Unfortunately the trees are blurry since there was an occasional breeze that night. The other major mistake we made was that we did not turn on our noise reduction setting. We learned about this afterwards. If you look closely there are little red dots in the sky and this is noise. Oh well, not bad for a first attempt!

Star Tracks near Salmon River