One Night in Paris

Our photography group was invited to Paris, KY to shoot at Greg's place. OMG, huge backyard surrounded by horses and cattle.  Idyllic.  Plus two German Shepards with a lot of personality.  Set up our cameras to photograph burning steel wool.  Some research prior to meeting told me I should use something like F8, ISO 200, tungsten white balance, and a shutter speed of 15 seconds, with a 35mm lens.  2 second delay after depressing the camera button.  Some practice AND advice helped in making slight modifications.  I lowered the ISO to 100, but eventually brought it back to 200.  Changed shutter speed to 30 seconds and that worked much better. George first lit the steel wool and spun it around.  The looser the steel wool, the greater the sparks - making a dazzling display.

This was followed by light painting.  It was getting late in the evening/morning, so this was an abbreviated session.

Some new things to try for another session - slowly zooming the lens in and out. I also took a semi-decent photo of the Big Dipper, but nothing I want to post on this blog.  I need to purchase a remote shutter release to reduce camera shake.  Set delay to 10 seconds to also reduce shake?  Study up on star tracking.  I would loved to take a decent picture of the moon, as well as show star movement.

Fall Creek Falls State Park

The park encompasses more than 26,000 acres in Tennessee.  As the name implies, there are plenty of beautiful falls to hike to and see.

At Piney Falls, a person was practicing her yoga positions with a gorgeous backdrop.  This was taken with an F-stop of f/5.6, exposure time of 1/80 sec, ISO 400, focal length 55mm.

 

And a full picture of Piney Falls...

 

We saw two swinging bridges.  This one disappeared into a canopy of trees.  It felt very inviting and serene.

f/6.3, 1/25 sec., ISO 400, focal length 80mm

 

The underside of the bridge had a totally different feel. f/6.3, 1/160 sec, ISO 400, 18mm focal length. 

 Fall Creek Falls, at 256 feet, is one of the highest waterfalls in the eastern United States.  On the way to the falls, we saw this rock formation.  f/5.6, 1/15 sec, ISO 400, focal length 42mm.