Playing with some long exposures in Mexico

On my recent trip to Mexico I read a book about shooting at the edges of the day: during twilight. I was very excited to try this and so took my tripod along. My first foray was both scouting session–I had an idea of something to shoot, but I wasn’t sure–as well as babysitting session, my 2 year old son wanted to come along. So for that experience I didn’t bother taking my tripod and just tried to test the light, get a sense of how things would turn out exposure-wise, and try to lock down on a subject.  I took images every few minutes or so for quite some time (long enough to severely test my son’s patience) and ended up liking the lighting of those images create later, during nautical twilight.  I was also intent on keeping an eye on my son at the same time…so this first shot, as you can see, is a bit blurry.

This next one came out better given I had a tripod and was without child for the moment.  I’m happy with the exposure but I feel like the movement in the boats is a bit distracting.  I’m working on processing a few others from the evening so I may yet discover something that satisfies me.  For those who are interested the pier here is the same from a previous post.

This third shot was something I came across on a pier that was being lit by the full moon.  This pier is off-limits after the ferry to Cozumel shuts down for the evening and I was shooting over the security barrier but my camera would not auto-focus without some extra help.  So I whipped out my handy, military issue, high powered flashlight and lit up the posts with the power of 100,000 candles.  Success!!  But I hadn’t counted on accidentally lighting up the slumbering security guard as well.  Oops!!  You can’t see him but he advanced on me right in the frame and said something unintelligible to me but whose message was quite clear.  Eeek!  My first photographic confrontation!  Luckily I put on my best cheezy grin, showed him the image I had just make and said, “bellissima photo, no?”