American Love

Last winter, a few friends and I discovered midnight photography. The hit and miss (mostly miss) photography at night using extremely long shutter speeds, and a lot of patience! We would setup our cameras on our tripods and wait for a result. For some reason, we have never done this during the summer, when the temperature would be more comfortable. Oh well, running around being completely cold is fun too!

Now, I call this form of photography Midnight Photography just because I felt that it needed some type of lingo to discuss the pictures between my friends. Night Time Photography just wasn’t quite as catchy to me, as Midnight Photography! I don’t know, you can be the judge on that one!

So, the other day, a post I read on Strobist about continuous lighting revolutionized my process on midnight photography, and gave me a real “duh” idea. Bring a really high-powered flashlight to add some light to the picture! Wow, why didn’t I think of that? I could even use it to shine light on what ever I am trying to focus the picture onto, and improve focus quality. Wow, I suddenly feel innovative through other people’s ideas.

So, later in the evening after getting some things done, my friend Scott and I went out on a quest to find the right equipment for the shoot. We first visited Home Depot, but to no luck, we ended up in a half hour conversation with one of the employees. I had explained to her that I never shop at Home Depot for building houses, but really only for my photography. She was so confused, and didn’t really know what to think about this. After much looking around, I found nothing useful, but the employee kept trying to get me to order a flashlight boasting 18 million power flashlight (no mention of candlelight or anything, 18 power of what? That was ridiculous!) from their web site. I agreed, but only if they could get it shipped to me in 15 minutes. Of course, they couldn’t, so I went to Wal-Mart, and bought a Black & Decker 2 million-candlelight flashlight for somewhere around $30. Which was perfect, I couldn’t imagine what I would do with 9 times the power! Well, then again, I am sure I could come up with something!

So after messing around with the flashlight, shining it on our bodies and in our eyes for a few minutes and getting some food in our systems we were eventually ready. Now, I don’t recommend shining something so bright into your eyes, we were just wondering because it was so incredibly bright that it would be interesting to see what it would feel like.

So we eventually got everything together and went out in search for the perfect location for the nights shoot. We eventually came up with the idea of an abandoned gas station in west Eugene. We arrived after 15-20 minutes of driving, and we were completely satisfied, we hung out for a while and took some fun pictures. But it wasn’t until I remembered that I had a smaller crank-rechargeable flashlight in my glove compartment in my car when I decided to start drawing words in front of a huge painted American flag mural.

This is when I came up with the idea of writing LOVE in front of the flag, something I have been feeling like our country has been missing out on. LOVE. I am always out to make pictures that mean something to people. And I feel this picture hit the spot. It may not be amazing, or breath taking, but at least I feel accomplished!

So behind the scenes on the picture, just a little background on how it was shot, and what process I went through to take it. It was actually a rather simple picture. I first shined the bright light onto the wall and focused the camera, and set all of the settings. I had it set to 30-second exposure, and at 100 ISO, and around f/4. I had Scott push the shutter button, and as soon as it opened, he swooshed the bright light across the flag. I quickly there after jumped into the frame and drew with the flashlight facing directly toward the camera the word LOVE. I felt really girly writing this, because you have to move your body in such weird ways to get such large, and cursive letters. But overall, since you can’t see me being girly in the picture, I think it worked out!