Hi! My Picture Day: my first contest post

in #mypictureday7 years ago (edited)

Hey there.

I'm a professional photographer and I just found out about Steemit, and uh, THIS PLACE ROCKS. I recently stumbled across the MyPictureDay photo challenge and wanted to play along. Here are 3 of my favorite images from a classic American muse: Joshua Tree National Park near 29 Palms, California.

Scroll down to see how I took the light trails :)
I really hope you enjoy my work and you should check the challenge out yourself!

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No, it's not photoshop! It's a simple technique called light painting. In early photography, 400ISO film had to be exposed to light for 1-2 minutes in order to properly expose the image; if you look closely at vintage photos (pre-1920s or so), clouds, moving water and walking pedestrians all have an ethereal blurriness to them. Today, cameras are much sharper. We can take photos in broad daylight at 400ISO at just hundredths of a second!

Buuut, if you want to play around with those concepts, you can create some pretty cool images due to the warping of movement in long exposures.

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These images are all one single image with no layers or photoshop magic. Just some choreographed long exposures with the help of my 4 good friends.

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Here's the break down:

  1. Place camera on tripod with Speedlite mounted on the hot-shoe (2nd curtain flash, that's very important!!)
  2. Put camera on a 25+ second exposure, exposing for the background
  3. Line up your friends and tell them to stay as still as possible in their poses until they see the flash fire
  4. Run around like an idiot using a very bright LED light to "paint" light into the foreground, background and subjects to desired final effect.

It takes a few tries, but the results are always so impressive and you'll have a lot of fun doing it!

Ciao,

Mariah

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welcome to steemit! You may find several photography challenges/contests here, so enjoy and good luck!

Thank you @edward.maesen! If you have any suggestions on some good ones you've found I'm all ears!

First of all I should make you aware of BeScouted a photography community linked to steemit. With respect to contests, the following users all organize contests, some daily, some weekly and some bi-weekly:

Good luck if you decide to enter a contest, some give quite decent prizes!

Welcome to Steemit from Indonesia, this is an amazing platform for creativity and imagination. Share, comment and make friends

Excellent photos, thanks for sharing.

Cheers!

Steem ON & Welcome!

Man thanks friend!!