Well, the month is still going on strong…. between the newspaper, classes, the internship, and various other commitments, time really doesn’t exist… so, I really haven’t gotten to do any fun shooting for a long while.. so, this past weekend, while Virginia was in Denver (She’ll do a blog update later) I finally got to go out and do some shooting… well… first I had to go shoot a local “Tough Man Competition”
So… the above is about what I was thinking… I was thinking that a Tough-Man competition would be a mouth-piece and some tape on the hands / wrists…. then, they’d get out there and beat each other senseless…. I was picturing sweat and blood flying.. broken noses… good old American fun. However, I was mistaken.
Now… yeah.. that guy is getting punched in the face… but they’re wearing 16oz gloves and headgear…. not to mention the groin protector… I’m not saying that boxing isn’t tough… boxing is hard-core, and it takes someone who’s in great physical condition to last more than a few seconds in the ring.. but… I wouldn’t call boxing a tough-man competition… Also, you may notice that the above pictures are.. horrible… well, the “Arena” was the local National Guard Armory… which was horribly lit… and, we “press” members had to sit at tables that were pushed up against the ring… meaning that we had to attempt to shoot through the ropes, and that’s never fun.
There were a few opportunities for some tighter shots… but not very many… and while there’s a little blood on this guy, I wouldn’t exactly say that there was a lot of blood flowing outside of the bodies…
There were a few decent hits though… some that were enough to make people take a little nap on the mat for a while…
So, after the boxing, Zack and I hopped in the car to go take a few pictures… of course, at the time, it was dark.. so, that made for some interesting pictures….
It was a full moon… so I couldn’t pull crazy long exposures.. for most, it seemed that the magic number was somewhere between 4-10 minutes….
The moon made some pretty cool shadows… and the clouds made some cool streaks in the sky…
We ended Saturday night by spending some time shooting this awesome old bus.. I think that the bus has been converted to a home.. or, it may possibly be the start of a hippie commune… note the stove-pipe coming out of the front window, and the plywood replacing the front windshield… So… another short note on the bus.. this bus is off the Parkway a little bit… over a few fences and a hike up a hill…. now… this was a decently steep hill…. you can stand on top of the hill, look around 360 degrees, and it’s like you’re above everything… you can see for miles and miles… but, the hill is steep.. on all sides. There’s no way this thing was driven up the hill under its own power. So, I have no other logical explanation other than to say that the bus was dropped on top of that hill by aliens. So… after a few shots of the bus, I ended up back at home at about 3AM.
Saturday, I woke up at 7… got a shower… and drove in to pick up Zack. We then headed up to Shady Valley, where I was helping out Zack with some motorcycle photography… It was supposed to be in the 70’s on Saturday… but that didn’t happen. What did happen is that I got sunburned. It got up to about 50. So, we only saw half a dozen motorcycles in about 4 hours… so, I drove Zack back to his dorm, and went out to do a little Recon for the shoot we wanted to do Saturday night… This found me up on the Parkway again… but after a short time, I found what I was looking for (More on that below) So, I gave Josh a call, and he agreed to come meet me at the intersection of 221 and 421… so, since I happened to be driving past the Park and Ride at the time, I pulled in, put the car in park, and absolutely passed out. Josh says he had to beat on the window about 3-4 times to get me to wake up and unlock the door for him… it was only a 10 minute nap… but man… it felt amazing.
So, then Josh and I grabbed a quick meal… picked Zack up again… and by about 6:30 we were on our way out to the Dark Sky Observatory, which is an observatory owned by the University. We have been planning on doing this for a long time… and finally got around to it, even though the conditions weren’t the best… Sure, it was decently warm and the sky was clear, but this past weekend was a full moon. So, we knew that the moon was going to rise at about 9:30.. so we got there around 7 and figured we could beat the moonrise…
So, pointing at Polaris gives those nice tight circles over about a 30 minute exposure…. however, we realized that perhaps we weren’t at “the” observatory… so, we went for a quick walk… we discovered a much larger building up the road just a bit, and I came back down to the above shot and cut the exposure short….
I had this awesome shot lined up… right through the center of the dome… and the dang thing moved in the middle of the shot…
And the same thing happened here…. but… I think the effect on this one isn’t as bad, since it’s not such a tight shot on the dome itself…
Here’s another challenge of shooting during a full moon… in the foreground, you can see the shadow of my tripod…. once again, it doesn’t bother me too much… but I’d prefer if it wasn’t there….
There were all sorts of interesting photo opportunities at the observatory…. but we really wanted to be there for the star trails… so once the moon made that no longer an option, we headed out towards other places….
Is there any better place to be at 10pm than a graveyard during a full moon? I think not… here you see the headstones directly ahead… the shadows created by the full moon… and behind the fence, a bit of evening traffic coming through….
The church really had all sorts of interesting shots… and it was a neat looking church in general…
So.. all in all, the weekend was great for some non-required photography…. I had a blast out shooting… and a I learned some great techniques… Until next time…. ….
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