We’ve got relatives in Arizona, so occasionally when we’re visiting we get an opportunity to drop in on some local attractions. On one trip I thought I’d experiment with a long-exposure nighttime shot of one of the telescope domes at Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory:
It’s odd, but once your eyes get adjusted to the lighting, you don’t particularly notice its red coloration.
One of the fun things about night shots is that you can get some interesting “free†effects from the different color temperatures used in street and building lighting. This is a shot of downtown Seattle, taken from the Space Needle late at night — shortly before they chased us all off the observation deck.
Here, the white balance is set to make the building lights look right — resulting in orange streets. I particularly like how the monorail line is silhouetted from beneath.
Originally posted to the old blog on May 5, 2009; on Flickr over here.
The tracks (rails of the Denver metro light rail system) glide by as we head home…
I’d seen images like this before — but via film. I wanted to see what it took to make an image like this with my digital gear. After some fiddling, I found that an exposure of 1/30 second or longer works just fine — so long as the train is up to full speed (about 60 miles/hour, or about 95 kilometers/hour).
If you look very closely, you can see some subtle reflections from the inside of the train (since there’s no way to get my camera outside the window for this image). I’ll have to spend a little more time in Photoshop cleaning them up. Still, I like how this turned out. The rail tops are nice and sharp, and the rail ties are blurred out, but don’t overlap.
I’ve noticed one odd thing, though — because the rails are at an angle to the image’s edges, the image always looks crooked to me. I *know* it’s rectangular, but it always looks skewed. This must be some sort of illusion, I’ll have to look it up…
Originally posted to the old blog on June 25, 2008; on Flickr over here.
Another fireworks shot from the 4th of July in Boston. This one has a nice abstract feel, thanks to the wind-blown smoke left over from a previous round of explosions.
Originally posted to Flickr on July 16, 2009.
On a trip back to New Mexico, we managed to stay a night and a day in Santa Fe. After the pup was in bed, Mrs. Argos wanted a little “me time,” so I grabbed my gear and headed downtown for some night shots. I thought this play of light and shadow was interesting:
The contrast in geometry between the shadow lines and the joints between the sidewalk pavers is kind of neat too. FWIW, I did very little to this shot other than crop it a bit and desaturate it (although not completely).
Originally posted to the old blog on October 23, 2009; on Flickr over here.
