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Best of - Light Show

You can ask just about any photographer the question "What's the most important thing to a photographer?..." and the answer is usually light.

Light is was allows us to shoot photos of anything. Sunlight, Flash, Fire, you name it. Without light... we've got just a plain black photo. The better the light, the better the shot. Now, that's not to say the brighter the light the better.

Jason Palmer/Times Record News
Dozens of people wait in line for the ferris wheel as it spins with a blur of color at the Texas Oklahoma Fair Thursday night at the MPEC.

Light is what you make of it and how you use it. This shot was done completely with the low lights at the carival. A long exposure (several seconds) were used to achieve the blurred ferris wheel spinning and luckily, the people in line were still enough for several seconds to be clearly in focus in the shot.

This sort of photo isn't particularly unique, or difficult for that matter. Simply, being in the right place at the right time and knowing what you are doing to make a good photo like this. It came out perfect.

Jason Palmer/Times Record News
Lauren Knight and sister Sierra (right to left) sit on top of a truck and watch several fireworks bursts before the big 4th of July fireworks show during Freedom Fest at Sheppard AFB Friday night.

Out of all of the fireworks photographs I shot this year... this is by far my fave. Oddly enough, it's not the big huge bursts of light that make it so high on my list. It's the little bit of light that is illuminating the arms of the girls.

I was set up in a parking lot near Sheppard AFB with the singular goal of finding somebody sitting on the top of their vehicle so that I could get a shot silohuetted against the sky and lights.

I was lucky in that I found my perfect setup and then it was just a matter of time until the big show started. Of course, there were dozens of small displays going on from the hundreds of folks along Sheppard Access Road... and I decided to frame a shot where I knew several were firing.

The blue tinge in the sky was nearly invisible to the human eye, but a long exposure brings out all sorts of surprises... just as I was shooting, a car pulled into the same parking lot and hit the girls with a little bit of light from their headlights. It help set them apart from the background and everything else just fell into place.

Jason Palmer/Times Record News
A flash illuminates a rider during as he warms up before the mass start of the 2008 Hotter'N Hell 100 in downtown Wichita Falls Saturday morning.

Sometimes it's all luck.... like this one.

I was really just messing around shooting long time exposures of riders in the pre-dawn streets of downtown during HHH. I wasn't really trying to do anything but kill time.

So as I'm tracking one of the riders, I see a bright pop of light go off down the street on the same side as me. It was a camera flash... somebody else took a photo of the same guy.

I quickly checked the screen on the back to see what it looked like.. and amazingly, it worked. Just like any off-camera flash that I've used before, the rider was perfectly lit from the side against a crazy blurred background. It was just different enough for me to want to include it in my best of.

I had never seen something quite like that before.... I guess you can still learn a few tricks.

Posted by Jason Palmer at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)