The Neighborhood @ Night

The shutter release I ordered last week arrived and I have been experimenting with long exposures and night photography. This was entirely new to me. I set up the tripod on my front porch and started shooting. Now, what you see in the images is not what the neighborhood looked like to the naked eye. It was almost midnight and extremely dark... these images have so much more detail than what the eye could see.

Across the Street

ISO 200 F/3.5 73 Seconds WB3650k

Our House

ISO 200 F/5.6 9 Minutes WB3150k

In the full version of the image of our house you can start to see the rotation of the earth as the stars start to streak. I This has inspired me to try an even longer exposure... maybe a few hours... where you can really see the rotation. I doubt that I will be able to do this in my neighborhood though because of the light pollution...

Jeremy Standing on the Sidewalk.

ISO 200 F/3.5 29 Seconds WB3550k

In order to get this image I shined a flashlight on him for about 5 seconds.

I know that this technique has been done, but I really wanted to try light-writing. We used the gas lighter we have for our citronella candle to burn writing in the sky.

This would have been easier with a constant light - it was challenging to keep the flame lit as we moved it through the air.

Once you got used to writing backwards this light writing was really fun... I'd like to do a project using a technique like this one day. Any ideas?

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The following night we had a power outage in the neighborhood. I was curious about how the neighborhood would look without all of the light pollution. I had a hard time getting any detail with the exposure times from the night before so I tried an even longer exposure. The results were crazy. Although the neighborhood was pitch black, the images looked as though they were taken at dusk/dawn.

Midnight Sky.

ISO 100 F/5.6 181 Seconds WB2650k

During the exposure of the second image the poswer came back on for the last ten seconds of the exposure. It ended up working out well - you were able to see the window lights and front porch lights without them being blown out (like the night before).

The Neighborhood at Midnight.

ISO 100 F/5.6 454 Seconds WB2950k