xmas lights

Published November 24, 2004

Too much traffic. I pulled over to take a break and saw these two christmas “trees” made up of a few strings of lights.

This industrial park had zero lights on except for these strings of lights and some decorations on the roof. so i broke out the nikon d70 and started experimenting.

Keeping the flash off and using ‘bulb mode’ i snapped open the shutter and ‘wiggled’ the camera for a few seconds and released the shutter closed. the effect is painting across the frame with the available light but instead of the lights moving, i move the camera. i actually do this alot when i shoot inside dark interiors with specific light sources, so as to create nice streaks and loops to fill negative space.

The result makes the strings look more like trees. after some practice i started swinging the camera to make the trees even fatter at the bottom while keeping the top ‘point’ rather static.

By the end of a few minutes i was painting the light to make it look like the trees were on fire.  You can see the rest here . you can see what the strings looked like before i used the shaky cam technique. and you can see how i was moving the camera very well with some of the lights giving away the path of movement. Of course, i might be the only that thinks this is neat. this is what happens when i get bored and pull over for a smoke.