How I Did It

If you take a look at my last post, you will notice three pictures.

The first is of symmetry made from elements [almost] at hand in my friend's diner. I use "[almost]" because none of the utensils matched. My friend indulged me by finding two sets and I got to work setting up the shot. Now that I look at it, the salt and pepper are in different kinds of shakers. Oh well. This was a timed exposure based off of a guess that turned out to be extremely accurate. After the scan I did not have to alter anything!...except a minor amount of cropping to coincide with my vision.

Shot two is of a chess game I played with my father (whom I thoroughly trounced). It looks a bit unusual - somewhat blurry, but still sharp. I accomplished this look by "dragging the shutter," which is a really handy technique and perhaps underutilized today. What you want to do is set your shutter speed really low, maybe 1/15th or 1/8th of a second along with the firing of a flash. Use those speeds if you to minimize this effect, but I really like it, so I shot on bulb mode and asked my mother to manually trigger the flash from camera right (which is where those shadows come from) upon my direction. This is how it turned out and I like it.

The last shot, I am not completely sure why I included. It was pretty late when I uploaded it and my brains may have been flocculent. I used the same technique (bulb mode, with a different voice activated flash), but the room had a bit more light in it, so the effect does not have the same gravitas. I like Scrabble. Though I am still learning, I won this game against said voice activated flash trigger. My co-worker regularly thrashes me, but I feel I am not quite as much of a pushover as I used to be. Do you hear that 3427?

flickr photos