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The Beauty of Nature
As Christopher mentioned, this weekend was filled with photography, and lots of it, with close to 2,500 pictures taken over a three day period. And let me say right off the bat… the 5D Mark II is an absolutely amazing camera, and with it we got great results, both with light painting and traditional photography in my backyard. The picture that goes along with this post is one of several taken in sequence of a bee drinking the nectar out of a large rosemary bush down on a hill of my backyard.
Being one of my favorite pictures of the day, I thought it would be one worth editing in Camera Raw, and my premonition was correct when I saw the final result of an already beautiful photograph. Is it still in need of work? Yes, of course; nothing in the Mac Lab is ever finished. But as it currently stands, it’s not all that bad.
As time permits, with finals and all coming up, more editing and posting will take place and we will show some of the great pictures we took throughout the weekend.
Light Painting, Take 2
Kyle and I spent about an hour and a half light painting during our marathon of photography on Saturday and ended up with a single image that we dubbed good enough to make an appearance here. As part of our weekend plan, we hoped to go to downtown San Diego at night and do some light painting with the cars and lights of the city. This is a different type of light painting than the one we had been doing before. Instead of running around with flashlights drawing something in the air, we would simply set up the camera and see what happened to drift in front of it. Come Sunday, our plan was carried out.
We met just after 5pm, and after fixing some tire pressure problems, my mom drove us into the city. We didn’t want to go alone primarily because we wanted an extra person to keep an eye on the cameras while we were working. On the drive there, we took out the 5D Mark II and took turns taking long exposures of the lights of the highway, and produced some pretty cool and amazing patterns.
We went first to Horton Plaza, and ascended to the seventh floor. We took photos of the city from vantage points around the mall and of the interior of the mall itself, before the security guards told us we couldn’t. We were only allowed to take pictures of ourselves in the mall, not the architecture of the mall itself.
We decided to leave Horton Plaza and took the elevator down to street level. We took position just outside the main entrance to the mall and took a few long exposures of traffic entering the mall. This post’s featured image was the second of these pictures. We then crossed the street and captured shots of the cars moving perpendicular to the first shots. After that, we moved further down the street towards a building lit with vibrant purple and orange lights, but didn’t get too close because of a group of loud football fans shouting and cussing away their disappointment at the Chargers’ loss.
By then, it was after 8pm, and we were getting hungry. We had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe before heading home. On the way back, we took more pictures out the windows of the car, which turned out to be even cooler than the ones we took before. It turns out that we took a total of 134 pictures, and not counting the ones taken from the car, 9 are worth keeping and exploring in Photoshop. I briefly processed two of these images in class today, and posted them on the “Photo Gallery” page. They are likely not done, but I wanted to post something from that day. Overall, I would call it a fairly successful day, and we plan to do a lot more light painting in coming weeks.
