Time Exposures, Fire and Snow.

The other night we bar-b-qued and I decided to light a fire in the fire pit we bought last year. Might as well get our money's worth from the thing. Of course not wanting to miss out on a chance to use my camera, I had a couple of things I wanted to try out. One was a time exposure using the ambient light to get some stars etc. What I wound up with was the reflected light of the fire on the underside of the branches of some of the trees in the back yard. I thought it looked pretty good on the small screen when I saw it, but it looks better when you see it blown up in a larger image. Not sure the blog will do it justice but overall not bad for the effect. I tried to get a picture of Orion's belt but my inexperience with the camera started to show when I couldn't get it to focus and for some reason it didn't want to take the photograph. Well, I had better get into the owner's manual a little more.
The other thing I wanted to try was another time exposure, this time with the fire in the foreground. Nathan was patient at first but started to get antsy, with "Hurry up Dad!" Hey, kiddo, perfection takes time! Anyway, this was the best of the shots, he moved the least here. I used the 55-200mm lens, should have switched to the 18-55mm lens but was too lazy and the natives were getting restless.

Last picture was from the snow we received a couple of weeks ago. This picture may look a little better cropped but my time is spent typing my Masters paper currently so I have don't have time to mess with Photoshop right now. Maybe in a few more weeks when I am Masters complete.