It’s Sunday. I got a nice long rest last night. I woke up and fixed some things on my site. It’s still very much a work in progress. Lately I’ve been making changes quite a lot. Sometimes there are pretty obvious errors that need fixing. Sometimes I just don’t like the way something comes across. I want to be as clear and concise as possible while still conveying a little of who and what I am. Who and what I am is changing daily, so it can be difficult to nail down how I want the copy to read.
I did a good bit of work in Lightroom today. Not sure what inspired me to start playing with the meta data, but that’s what I did. I refined and reorganized my presets. First I had to remember how to make changes as it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with them. That kinda led into trying to clean up my keywords. That’s a very difficult thing to do after the fact when you have forty thousand files in your library, and it’s constantly growing. I’m going to need to think about upgrading my storage in the next year or so. But with the keywords I started out using Adobe Bridge as a file manager, which was a mistake. I thought I was being proactive and making things easier and more streamlined for myself in the future by creating a keyword hierarchy. Turns out it just a made a mess when Lightroom looks at the meta data. I don’t think I’ll ever make it how I want it without undo time and effort. It just isn’t reasonable.
I did play around with some experimental shots I took several nights ago. They were taken from the comfort of my couch. I appreciate comfort a great deal, and wish I found myself in more different comfortable situations where I could just shoot random things in different ways.
The pictures I’m posting with this entry are variations on a ceiling fan. It’s all the same image. It’s just manipulated a little bit in each frame. A very little bit actually, but the looks are very different. I find it fun to play around/experiment with images sometimes. I’m probably being foolish to post things like this, but oh well. I doubt anyone will even look at this post.
I need to work on my negativity. I suppose that this blog project is sort of a way to navigate my issues. Writing things like this help me order my thoughts. Archive them. Putting them online could be dangerous in some ways, but I will continue until I see reason not to. In the mean time I’m enjoying and probably getting some therapeutic benefit from creating these posts. It’s interesting to see it evolve.
This experimental series was created while returning from my trip to Atlanta. The same trip I’ve posted about recently where some family and I visited a couple museums over the Christmas holiday, 2024. The trip was a bonanza photo taking experience for me. I got quite a lot of interesting things added to my collections. Perhaps someone other than myself enjoyed some of these.
I’m glad I have this new forum to share my work. It kinda helps motivate me to do something with some of my photography. I have quite a lot of good things to share in my humble opinion. Many of those good things can be used as pieces making up new and other good things, a bit like my Balz project posted back on the High Museum: Part 4 blog. It wasn’t phenomenal, but I didn’t put too much work into it. Just having a little fun. Which is to say if I had a good reason, I could likely make something pretty wicked cool if I had hours and hours if I wanted to spend working with it. I may still play with that project a little more sometime, if I feel an urge.
I have a lot of ideas that almost never have anything made of them other than some vague picture in my mind. But I hope I can bring myself to be more actually creative instead of theoretically creative. That is kinda what this blog post is about. Which is to say I had some ideas I thought could be fun, interesting, and possibly cool. While I was killing time as an automobile passenger on the way home from a family trip to Atlanta, I thought I’d play with my camera a little bit. I enjoy trying and learning new things.
I started out playing with shutter speeds in conjunction with the moving vehicle. I and the vehicle were traveling along at about 55mph, and I was experimenting with shutter speeds on the mostly stationary objects outside the vehicle. Usually, at least in my case, I am the one that’s a stationary object, and the subject is the one moving. And it was interesting.
The first pic of this gallery, shows the results of a shutter speed experiment. The results were interesting. Most of the pix i took during this time were disappointing and rejected. I expected lack luster results when I started playing with my camera. I was just bored.
Experimental Highway Shots
The fog at the time was a huge variable that added a lot to all these images. It was an unusually foggy day with the fog lasting all day at very dense levels across the entire region we traveled through. Trying to shoot anything from a moving vehicle in an unplanned scenario is difficult, at least for me. One must see something interesting, focus on it, adjust the settings, and then get the shot, all while moving at highway speeds. These roads being surface level state highways the speed limit was usually 55mph.
I quickly got bored with the first approach. There were miles upon miles of nothing but trees and oncoming traffic. Oh, and fog. Had I found a nice spot to set up, I’m sure I could have made something I actually liked for whatever that’s worth.
This next group of photos were taken a good while after the first batch. After a while our group got on the interstate proper. I found it a good opportunity for pics that more interested me. The fog was still heavy. Traffic on the interstate was pretty dense. There were a lot of lights and colors. Lights and colors being of great interest to me, I pulled my camera back out. I got some pretty cool shots. One or two of which I thought were actually pretty good in their way. I was enjoying myself more at this point than when on the rural surface streets. But I did eventually start getting board again. I knew the area quite well and knew there weren’t much in the way of landmarks I thought had any real potential for being interesting. And pictures of cars on the road are basically just pictures of cars on the road. Not something I needed for any reason whatsoever. So I gave it a rest. But I did get some cool stuff.
Soon my next idea to play with my camera dawned on me. It came to me pretty quickly after I got bored with the shutter speed shots of the interstate traffic. My next idea was an extension of something I started playing with earlier in the day at the High museum.
While taking photographs of mostly the exhibits, at the High museum, I encountered a technical problem. I was going through my camera’s settings trying to figure out what was causing the problem, and I was very frustrated at the time. I had gone through every setting in the camera’s digital menu and couldn’t figure what to do. I was starting to worry the camera was malfunctioning. It turned out the problem was the mode dial, nothing in the menu settings. Somehow I had inadvertently twisted the dial to take timed delay shots instead of the usual standard single shot mode. Delay mode shots are primarily intended to grant a photographer a few seconds after hitting the shutter button to get into position with the rest of their family before the exposure fires.
Anyway, while investigating my menu settings trying to pin point my immediate issue, I came across a feature I have almost never used. A feature I thought was essentially worthless. It was something I had never really given any serious thought to, but it for some reason piqued my interest. It was the multiple exposure mode. I decided I would try it out in the field a bit. It was actually kinda fun. I could see potential to do cool things. I had always been of the opinion, if I wanted to merge two images I could and would do it in Adobe’s Photoshop. But with time i came to see multiple exposures would be cool and useful in some circumstances.
Multiple exposure mode in the museum wasn’t particularly useful, at least it didn’t seem so at the time. There could be some awesomely cool stuff you can do with it there, but I didn’t and don’t know what. The things I did with it at that time were purely experimental. I didn’t have all day to play around with it. I think I had one or two shots from that location that came out kinda nice, but most were just meh. Besides, merging together two different artists works into one mash-up is kinda disrespectful, and I can’t see a good reason to ever publish it.
Which brings me to this next gallery, which as you can see encompasses my entertaining and educational experiment using various types of multiple exposures. All of these have been taken directly from the camera with only some digital processing. No editing of any kind has been performed on any of the shots in this gallery. There are several different sub-modes available in multiple exposure mode that have widely varying effects. I played around with a couple, but ran out of road too quickly to do as much as I would otherwise have done.
Screenshot of the sub modes in multiple exposure mode
I was not at all drunk or otherwise impaired when I took these pictures, but as you can see they have a very dunk effect to them. Kinda like your seeing double. Because you kinda are. Adding in the slow shutter speeds inside a fast moving vehicle, and you have some interesting if discombobulating images.
