Winter Wonderland

Hey y'all! Hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year. We've been eating left overs all day yet seem to have more in the fridge now than when we started. Between work and the festivities it's been a while since I posted anything up here so I thought I'd better sort that out.

Last week I met up with some family and, amongst other things, we went to the Winter Wonderland on the corner of Hyde Park. It's basically a big fair ground with an ice rink, loads of places to eat and Zippos' Circus (which was awesome). All of these things were festooned with bright lights, often rapidly moving, and this provided a good opportunity to mess around with long shutter speeds. The pictures above and below had exposures of about half a second. As they were taken hand held and very much on the fly they are pretty blurry; however, the effect of the lights on the rides streaking brightly through the frame more than make up for the technical shortcomings of the shot, I think.

The next two shots were even more ad hoc. A bunch of us went on the Fun House which, asides from being a lot of fun, was actually quite perilous for my camera; all the moving walls and bits of floor led to it taking a few knocks. Still, I got these interesting looking photos out of it. There was a curtain of lit plastic tubes that you had to walk through and I just fired off a few frames as I went through. I wasn't even aiming so I can't take any real credit but I do really like the way they turned out. They're both quite abstract and the second one makes good use of negative, dark space which contrasts nicely with the brightly lit tube. The first one brings to mind those weird bio-luminescent creatures that are found in the depths of the sea; the tentacles of a carnivorous jellyfish maybe.

If I can get back to another fairground when I have time to use a tripod then I think there's real potential here for some imaginative work.

In the coming weeks I'll be finishing off a last few posts on my trip to Vietnam last year and I'll also come up with a post on using textures in photos. This is a post processing technique that blends images together to create a antiqued feel to your pictures. More next week!