Special Effects Gallery

A great deal of my portfolio contains timed-exposure prints, although most of them are only a means to expose a normal subject in low light conditions using a small aperture to keep the whole scene in focus. But one of the best uses of timed exposures is for special effects. Time-lapse photography easily shows the motion of fast-moving objects. It can also show interesting effects in things like lightning, fireworks, waterfalls, waves and more. The photographs below show how time-lapse photos show the motion of a friend of mine on his jetski, especially the one on the right where the landscape is completely blurred sideways as I tracked his movement at 60mph: These photographs below show another use for time-lapse photos in taking shots of fireworks over 4th of July weekend. The photo on the left, while looking like something out of Star Wars, is actually a series of smaller fireworks shot to the side of my camera, with the shutter held open for 7 minutes. The photograph on the right shows a much larger ground firework over a period of 5 minutes: Lightning is very difficult to photograph, since it does not stay in sight for more than a second. It requires a timed exposure and more work later in the darkroom to pick out the area of the storm that shows up best. This is usually the bolt that's closest to you, and I doubt that the lightning in this photograph was more than a mile away, since it was so thick and bright and I could see the glow on the underside of the clouds at the end of the bolt. I hear that the lightning from a tornado is even more spectacular, but I haven't gotten the nerve to go there. The negative where this bolt came from actually had a series of more than a dozen lightning bolts in it, most of them well off in the distance and pretty faint, so I cropped into this bolt and put a magenta filter over the black-and-white enlarger's lens when I made the print, to get more contrast in the print and leave out the faint, distracting bolts in the distance. Holding a camera's shutter open and moving the camera at the same time will also make some great patterns of motion. In these two shots below, I used my camera inside a tour bus in New York City to create a sense of motion. On the left, I showed a normal street by using higher-speed film and the faster shutter speed it required, so that there was not much motion blur. On the right, I used another roll of low-speed film & a really small aperture and then held the shutter open for two city blocks, getting a lot of strange light patterns when the bus went over steel plates and other bumps in the city street. After a friend's joke of the effects of the city lights in my image, I entered the photos in a student competition sponsored by the city of Baltimore, Maryland for an ad dealing with drug and alcohol abuse that would be shown on public safety billboards and pamphlets. Type was added later by a designer hired by the printing company that handled the final production for the city of Baltimore.