Corvette Z06 in Miami – Speeding Away…

Originally uploaded by dgmiami

All I can say about this shot is…. WOW, this turned out great, and people are talking!

As you can see from my last blog posting, I went out to shoot a car in various locations throughout Miami. We went out to Watson Island, drove through Coconut Grove, down through Gables by the Sea, and then found a great road with no traffic to take this shot. I knew the theory behind longer exposures and capturing motions, so I put what I thought was right for this shot into play…

First and foremost as to use my newly purchased tripod. I found an “open box” at Best Buy and saved twenty bucks, paying $30 for this one. Since I saved that money, I also bought a monopod as well. After setting up the car facing away from me, I put the tripod in the middle of the road and yelled at the driver – “GO!” – about a half second before hitting the shutter. Why the delay? You have to give time for human reaction! Figure it takes 3/4 of a second for someone to react to something like this if you try it out.

I set the camera to 400 ISO, 18mm, for a 6-second exposure. It was rather dark already and I wanted to make certain I captured as much as I could with the street lighting and what was left of the sunset off to the west (right side of the picture here).

Find a pedestrian overpass somewhere and start playing with your camera until you figure out what setting is just right for what you are dealing with. I worked on some of this during my recent trip to Las Vegas as shown in the night shot below. If you don’t take the time to play with your camera, the only other way to get a shot like this is pure luck! Here are some more samples of night shots with time exposure – click for larger images:

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The Paris hotel and casino

Originally uploaded by dgmiami

While visiting Las Vegas last week, I was able to take over 500 pictures and really get a grasp on the camera settings available to me in full manual mode. Having never done this before, I was pleasantly surprised at the results from a little experimentation with the settings.

As you can see in this picture, the water coming down from the fountain outside of the Paris Hotel and Casino appears to be a light colored curtain of water. Just to compare, I took a picture in full auto mode and was stunned how “ugly” it would look when the flash fires and captures the water droplets in air.

I sat on the sidewalk with my back to the fence separating me from the Las Vegas Strip, put my elbows on my knees and created a rather steady position from which I took this shot. I took several pictures at different time settings until I found the ideal time exposure of one second. The shot looked good on the camera display, but even better when I got it on to the computer screen. Another setting I played with on these shots was the white balance. I believe I set it to “tungsten.” Click the picture and see the picture properties on flickr (towards the lower left of your browser window).