Light Confetti

[mrteacherdude]

I'm sure these types of photos are out there, I just haven't seen them yet.

Intrigued by all of the insects flying around in some parking lot flood lights (20 to 30 feet tall) at the fairgrounds in Billings, Mt., I tried shooting a picture of them just for kicks. The initial shot was taken handheld with a 7d and 70-200 f2.8 L, 1 second at f2.8, iso 800, from behind the lights. Blurry since handheld, but interesting results.

So I got the tripod out and tried more shots under a variety of different settings over the next couple of nights, manual focus only. Two examples follow, the second one is currently my desktop image on my computer

focal length 200mm
shutter speed 0.25s
aperture f2.8
iso 1600
No adjustments to the photo, just resized for posting. Slightly OOF though




focal length 200mm
shutter speed 4s
aperture f2.8
iso 100
This one has been cropped, and the levels and contrast have been adjusted slightly to darken the sky.



In general I found I got better results with the largest aperture available. Higher iso's gave me brighter images, lower iso's produced darker skies, better contrast, and allowed me to keep the shutter open longer to capture more of the action. The "pulsing" in the light trails I'm sure is due to the beating of the wings of the insects. In the full resolution images, it is easy to notice the spider web underneath the right light. In a series of images you can even see the reflection of the spider in different places on the web (busy spider!).

[Gulf Coast Girl]

Very interesting. I really like the second one with the 4 second exposure. We got plenty of bugs around here ... I might have to give this a try.

TFS

[tuca]

I want to try this as well.

[Sebey]

nice .... trying this out went i head back home ....