Here is my first photo for my 365 project! I wanted to try and take some more night shots with the moon, but the clouds once again screwed me. I was driving around Fall River, Ma, the city I grew up in with a good friend Andrew. We where trying to find places we didn’t know existed – so I opened up google maps and looked for any areas down by a body of water. We came across this Boat Ramp that over looks South Watuppa pond and I started framing my shot. I did not have luck with the moon, but when I turned around I noticed the two boat ramps on each side of me looked really cool and symmetrical as they disappeared in to the water.
The problems here where it was past midnight and it was pretty dark. I tried a 5 second, 10 second, 15 second, and a few other long exposures with different ISO settings and got some cool effects, but still not really what I had imagined. It was also pretty windy so I the branches where blurring up a bit. I set my exposure time to 10 seconds and then had Andrew hide back out of frame with my 430EXII flash set to full 1/1 power. When I hit the shutter, I had Andrew run across the frame shooting the flash at some surrounding bushes to illuminate the dark areas. The end result was pretty cool, but there where two sections where the flash was pointed towards the camera and made for an unplesant blow back effect. I took another shot without the added flash then merged the two photos in Photoshop.
This was an un-planned attempt at light painting and I really can not wait to do more of this type of thing with better planning.
