What’s Your Preference?

Jiffers · #1 (**permalink**) 11-23-2009, 05:18 PM

I have always liked photograpy, and 4-wheelers, so when I have the chance to mix the passions, it's even better. I've made lots of photos while riding, and since I also like night photography, I've done some night shots while riding my ATV. But I was looking for something different, something a little more organized than my other photos. I decided that an outward spiral would look very organized, and be very do-able. So with my equipment, I headed to the sand dunes around the full moon (much safer to ride during a full moon, and it lights up the sand for nicer photos). The hard part was to find a spot that had a nice flat area large enough to do my spiral, with a hill to the side high enough to set up my tripod and camera and have a good POV. After scouting it out, and finding the spot, I set up my tripod and camera, got the composition that I wanted, with the moon just out of the frame, zoomed out as wide as possible (18mm in this case), focused on the center, set ISO to 200, set the camera to manual mode, opened up the aperture, set the shutter speed to bulb, and with my IR remote, opened the shutter. I then got on my ATV, and with the lights off (so that there isn't a light trail cutting through the spiral, there wasn't enough light to capture me riding, but you can see at the center when I stopped to turn on the lights, I stopped just long enough for the sensor start to capture me), I drove down to the center of the frame. Once there I turned on my lights, lightly pressed the brake, so the red lights would be brighter, and started in a tight spiral. The spacing was actually quite easy to keep it uniform, because in scouting out a location, I wanted one with very few tire tracks from other riders, so I was able to see where the last pass was, and I kept the inside wheel, right next to the outside track from the last pass. When I thought the spiral was outside of the frame, I turned the lights off, and rode back to my camera, and closed the shutter. The exposure ended up being 104 seconds.

Here is the finished product.
Vortex