April 1st, 2014

The sap began dripping today, about 3-4 weeks later than usual.  It has been a looooong, cold winter and the trees are taking their time waking up : )

I have had some photo ideas floating around in my head, so tonight as the sun was at the horizon, I headed out to the bush with some camera gear and a flashlight.  I had read about ‘light painting’ and tried it very unsuccessfully once, but it interests me and I thought I would attempt a couple of my ideas.

Light painting involves long exposures and using light to illuminate only the spots you want to capture in the photo.  I am not disappointed with my results, but I know there is lots of room for improvement.  I plan on trying again at some point this week, and tweaking things a little bit.

Here are the 2 photos that I was trying…

This is a 30s exposure where I used the flashlight to highlight the individual drops to form a stream of sap.

This was also a 30s exposure, but I illuminated the bottom of the bucket for 5s and then from the top down for 3s.  The rest of the exposure was left dark, but it gave me enough time to move around, etc.

I had a lot of fun getting out with the camera after the winter.  And just to top it off, the entire time I was out, the Great Horned Owls were calling back and forth to each other.  I am looking forward to another ‘photo shoot’ later in the week.

It seems like spring is here, so hopefully everyone will be getting out to enjoy it!