30 Days with the Fuji 35mm f2: Day Twenty-Three

For today’s post, I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to shoot post a wide variety of types of shots during this project, and I’ve kind of slipped into a creative rut with my recent shots. So, on my photo walk today, I made a conscious effort to do the things I don’t normally do. I shot full manual for most of the walk and got away from f8 (the focal length I use for probably 80% of my shots). I shot at night to force me to adapt and use my camera/lens differently to capture the light.

And near the end of my shoot, I decided to shoot some long exposure car trails. I was wandering by the train tracks when I saw this construction sign. I’m a sucker for infrastructure, so I set up shop here with my gorillapod and took a few long exposure shots with varying compositions. I stopped down to f16 for this shot to get the nice “starbursts” from the streetlights and to extend the shutter speed so that there was more motion in the clouds.

As with the time lapses that I mentioned the other day, I’ve been increasingly intrigued with long exposure shots. I think this is part of a larger fascination with the idea of introducing elements of motion into my photography. By definition, the medium of photography is static, but that doesn’t mean that the content of the images should be static. It’s generally good to provide depth to your images, whether that’s through a variety in light, contrast, focus, emotion, motion, etc. Generally speaking, the more depth an image contains, the more interesting it is. And lately, I’m really enjoying playing around with adding depth to my images via a sense of motion.