blog of kaiyen

truck by moonlight

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is from a workshop in Death Valley that I did in November. It was a workshop on, essentially, nighttime long-exposure photography. This was shot on color slide film, and is a 45 minute exposure. You can see the rather long star trails that result from such a long shot.

This scene is illuminated solely by moonlight. The truck was behind a building and I had a lot of time to walk around the truck with a flashlight to illuminate it further. Inside the cab, for instance, I lit it up quite a bit along with just generally painting the truck so that it would come out brighter and with a bit more luminosity.

A lot of people doing this type of photography like to use all kinds of colored lights to produce very different effects. Many are really creative and impressive. My personal taste is to keep the shot a bit more natural-looking and use not much other than a basic flashlight for extra light.