Drawing with a flashlight

I had always wanted to try out light drawing, so one night I grabbed a few LED flashlights and setup my camera in the kitchen with the lights off.


I was lazy so I just put the camera on the counter and aimed it toward the family room. I had my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens mounted and left that wide at 24mm. The shots were all taken with a 25 second exposure at ISO 100 and an aperture of f/13.


Drawing with LEDs and flashlights is a lot tougher than I thought it would be. After dialing in the exposure (the easy part) I had to mentally create a frame in my mind that was roughly the size of the image I'd be capturing. This was the canvas I drew on. The hard part was keeping the image in my head so that I could complete lines and add elements without "drawing" over areas I'd already passed my light through.


I only shot 12 exposures, checking back on the camera's LCD screen after each one, and the last 4 images actually turned out fairly well. Next time I attempt this I'll try drawing on objects and will keep the shutter open a bit longer to capture more of the background light. But, for a first attempt I'm pretty pleased.

Photos from Broadway and Columbus

I spent a night shooting around the corner of Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco a couple years ago this past November. This was my first real go at taking night shots.

This area of San Francisco is famous for neon, strip clubs and City Lights book store. Only a few blocks away is the Transamerica building - the iconic peak in the San Francisco skyline - and the surrounding financial district.

The shot above was taken with the canon 24-70mm lens at 24mm mounted on a 30d at f/14 for 2 seconds. The film speed equivalent was 100.

The three images below were all taken with the same lens at a variety of shutter speeds and apertures - all with the intention of capturing the glow of the lights that surround this corner of San Francisco.

Fishy Polyptych - "parade"

The four images that make up this polyptych (think triptych + 1) were taken at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California. The aquarium features quite a few viewing portals into the tanks where the lucite windows are around 6 feet tall. I took a series of shots with my 50mm 1.4 lens at f/5.0 with a 1/4 second exposure to get the motion of the fish to blur (ISO 200) - the camera was in a vertical orientation.

When I reviewed the shots these four seemed to line up very well, almost as if I had cropped four separate sections out of one shot.

Here are a few other shots from that trip to the aquarium. All of these were taken with the 50 1.4 lens on a Canon Digital Rebel (first edition) camera.