Among Other Things

It's been a busy few weeks. I've been shooting quite a lot lately. Most of it hasn't really turned out to be something worth raving over as an event from which I grabbed an amazing image.

One of the big ones that I really got caught up in is a car accident which occurred on a pretty snowy night. The kind of snow that blocks your headlights. The kind of snow that makes for really slick roads. The kind of snow that makes your car crash...

Basically these two cars slid or just didn't see each other and they ended up colliding head-on. Four people were injured and taken to the hospital.

Now to the photos. I tried pretty hard to not use flash a lot since that would have been basically the only major light in the scene and it would have looked pretty fake. Gladly there were a million cop cars out there and they had all their spotlights on and facing the scene. This gave me a lot of light.

At the same time, I shot a lot of low light shots to get a mood for the cold and dark feeling of the road. There wasn't a ton of room from side to side on the road because it was lined with trees.

Also, shooting people of the fire department persuasion with flash always turns out to make their reflective jackets look somewhat silly. I never like how it looks.


What's nice is that the spot lights create little highlight spots on people or the cars and that makes for a nice highlights and high contrast images.

This is a concept from waaayyy back in classic painting. It's called chiaroscuro and it works well for getting emotion to show up in a shot just with light.

Alright, the other item that I shot was a club hockey game at the local arena. I shot this one without flashes unlike the previous hockey game for a high school when I worked with Grand Haven.

This made for a lot darker shots. I also had issues with knowing how well exposed my shots were because my cameras' LCD screens were slightly over lit and thus made them look more well exposed than they were.

Long story short, I had to lighten them up a tad in Photoshop. That's nothing new in general. I've even heard of people constantly shooting slightly underexposed so that the colors in their images are more vibrant. Shooting too light then would cause them to be washed out.

Well, until the next interesting event happens...

Oh, and by the way I used to be hooked on shooting anything I could with a flash. Lately I really haven't been in that scheme of things. Instead I've really been shooting without a flash quite a lot. Not sure why it's become this way, but for whatever reason, it's been very enjoyable to shoot in a new sense of mind.