A photo

Today was another one of those days where I had no plan at all of what to shoot. None at all. But it was a warm night, so I just grabbed by camera (with just the 50mm on), and my bike and set out towards town.

Eventually, I ended up on top of the parking garage in downtown Bozeman. I missed the sunset by quite a bit, and I didn't have a long enough lens to get the moon, so I just stood up there for a while thinking about what to do. The view of the alley below was pretty cool, but I didn't see anything that really interested me.

Sometimes photography is about messages hidden in images. Most, if not all, famous photographers had careers based around this. But sometimes, a photo is just a photo for the sake of being a photo of something that interests the photographer.

There for, I dropped the aperture wide open, set the shutter to 1/3 second, and tried the freeze passing cars. There was a cross street a block up, and I just sat there for probably 15 or 20 minutes basically stalking cars. One would only pass every minute or so, so I had to be on it since I had a few seconds of a window. To help with the timing, I used drive mode. When a car drove past, I held the shutter and tried to pan at the same rate as the car. By doing this, I got about 3 photos of the car, and relative to the camera (theoretically) the car wasn't moving at all.

I only got a few good shots though. :( But one I really like. It even fits the rules of thirds and is properly exposed. Not bad for choosing exposure setting based only on aesthetic reasoning.

In Lr, I raised the clarity and shadows a bit, and dropped the highlights. This adds more contrast to the mid tones, and then recovers some of the washed out highlights. Not there's much of that.

So there you have it, a photo that is just a photo.

See you tomorrow!