299,792,458 m/s

Single Speed

Well the challenge for this month (October) was “Speed”. The Caterpillar Photographic Society (catps) had the entries open until past midnight on All Hallows’ Eve and there was a single entry.

Disappointingly, it was the only image to be submitted but at least it was a good one. (It was mine after all)

My picture titled “Light Speed” was a long exposure image with my camera supported in the rear of my car by means of tripod and bungee straps.

Bunkka

The pictures you can see below was taken on the second of two nights of driving with this camera set up in the back of my car. For those people perceptive enough to notice you’ll see that I was listening to a Paul Oakenfold track all the time I was trying to capture the perfect image to submit.

The first evening I had my tripod with two legs in the rear footwells and the third, shortened, and supported by the rear seat, then fastened to the seats with some bungee cords.

In order to be able to trigger the camera shutter I used a remote shutter release, cabled into the camera and if you look carefully you can see this in my left hand on the gear stick.

I set up the camera whilst seated in the rear looking at the LCD and decided that it was going to be a matter of chance so I couldn’t fix the shutter speed as there are multoiple different levels of light throughout the town so I set the camera into BULB Mode and focussed on the area in front of the car, the buildings etc. It looked ok on the LCD so I went for a spin.

In the brightly lit areas I tended to hold or lock the release button for shorter periods of time. I had one image that looked ok on the LCD at ISO 200, f/4.0 and shutter speed 1.3 secs.

The ISO was set deliberately low to avoid too much noise in the image that you get as a result of quicker ISO’s, the Aperture was set to f4.0 by default and I never thought to change it, this was a mistake.

Some of the images where I’d held the shutter open too long were way too over-exposed and the pictures I took when I held the button for too short a time were hideously under-exposed and really dark.

Planet of the Apertures

The main issue though, as I’ve briefly mentioned, was the aperture setting. f4.0 gave me a lot of light at the same time, compared to smaller apertures, (higher f numbers), so the time required to keep the shutter open was reduced.

The issue with an aperture of f4.0 was the Depth Of Field and the problem resulting from this was everything in the foreground was blurred beyond usefulness. I wasn’t expecting the interior of the car to be pin sharp as there were vibrations being transferred through the road, tyres, suspension, bungees etc.

The result of the picture is shown immediately below, it depicts the scene at the bottom of the Wyle Cop in Shrewsbury town centre.

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Speed II

For the second night of driving, I set up my phone with the Paul Oakenfold single playlist on repeat and repeated the exercise. This time though I used the bungee cords to make the tripod tighter to the floor of the car, this might stop some of the bouncing that I could see. I also set the camera up in the rear seat paying more attention to the focussing and zooming in on the LCD to check focus in Live View mode.

As a result of learning from my previous mistakes I set the Aperture to f/18 and the shutter mode to Bulb again. I drove over to my brother’s and his fiancee‘s  house in Broseley to drop off a telescope that I’d just sold to him. At various points throughout the journey I pressed the button on the remote release and locked it in for a few seconds.

The back roads to their house were no good for lights but there was a lot  of lights on the A5. I thought that the yellow flashers on top of the cones might give a good effect, there’s always loads of roadworks there, but upon reviewing the images it made for a confusing image. I drove around town after depositing the parcel at Gaz and Jem’s house and did a lot of images when I thought that the lights in the view from the windscreen might suit the image requirements.

After getting home and reviewing the images it was clear that there were a number of pictures that I’d caught well enough on time and the one you can see below is my image that I chose to submit.

I think this image was from Sundorne road by the sports village, here, with the green lights being the traffic lights, I’m not sure just what the blue light is though.

As you can see from the speedo I was doing 2mph over the speed limit which I was trying to keep to 30 by using cruise control, but the engine revs being so low wouldn’t let it stay in cruise control.

At one point, on the M54 motorway, I did think that it might be cool to have the speedo read 88mph as it was around Back To The Future day. I figured that going 18mph over the speed limit might be a daft thing to do, especially if I was going to record the fact…..

This image had a shutter speed of 4.7secs, an aperture of F/18 and an ISO of 800.

Pat Mustard

There’s technically no need to vote on the images in this month’s competition as my image has won by default, it’s disappointing as I thought I had a really good chance of winning, even against other people’s entries.

Hopefully the November category of Light Painting might see a few more entries from members who want to experiment with the darker evenings and longer exposures.

We’ll see eh?