In my last post I was playing with light indoors, both as a modifier to the image and as the subject. For these pictures I was playing with light as I rode home on the ferry. I live on an island so riding the ferry is a regular part of my life and one evening as we were approaching Nanaimo I was out on the deck with my camera and tripod. I was in the bow of the boat as we headed in close to the city and I used a 30second exposure with my lens at it’s widest focal length, (17mm) I held it there for several seconds then zoomed in during the exposure to create the light trails and stayed at the longest focal length, (55mm) for several more seconds. When I got it back to my computer I played with the saturation and the contrast quite a bit to get a pretty striking image. Luckily it was a pretty calm night, so the boat was not moving up and down and my light trails have just enough movement in them to give the thread like appearance but not so much that they are jiggling all over the place. The long exposure also smoothed out the water providing a nice contrast to the harsh lines of light in the top of the frame. The image is a not a literal representation of anything, but rather my light painting of Nanaimo at night. Below are some of my other experiments with light on that same ferry trip.
-Russell Berg
www.seeingberg.com
