The light was nice this evening, so I drove downtown. It’s the classic American mains street, a brick road lined with old, colorful buildings. My hope was to capture some people walking around. I wanted to manipulate the shutter speed, making the people on the street blur just enough to show they were there but disguise their features.
It didn’t work exactly as planned. Despite the fact that it was a nice evening, there was almost no one out and about. It figures, usually I’m either waiting for people go get out of the way so I can take a picture, or finding ways to creatively edit them out of the image before I press the shutter. Tonight, when I wanted people to walk through my lens, there were none around! So I had to settle for blurring the cars on the road, which were driving by at fairly regular intervals.
The street is still pretty, so I tried a few shots, all from the tripod. I captured a few different angles of the street and the buildings, using both the wide-angle and the standard lens. Finally, I took some pictures of the sinking sun through the trees. A few people did eventually show up, and I quickly realized my shutter was set for too long, and rather than blurring the pedestrians, it was making them disappear. By the end, I had the camera in full manual, having to adjust the aperture so I could decrease the shutter speed.
In the end, I did get some pictures with blurred people, several with blurred cars, and some nice shots of the street itself, but nothing that achieved quite what I wanted, and no one image really jumped out at me. (Some pesky dust specs made me rule out a few otherwise decent photos.) This is definitely one to try another day. I’d like to play with this a little more, when I can find more people out and about. I left when the sun got too low.
Ultimately, I selected this sunset photo as the best image of the day:
Photo #16: Evening on Main Street
Tech Details:
Equipment: Sony NEX-5R, 18-55mm standard lens, tripod.
Image: 1/2 sec exposure, f/25, ISO-100.
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