Photos to use around the site.

Hello mods and Bob.

Thought I'd make these available to use on the site in case there was any interest. Took these on our TW Ocotillo Wells night run last night. Kind of goes along with the "world" part of TacomaWorld...the sky looked very alien at night.

Use them, don't use them, whatever...just thought I'd give you guys permission if you choose to.

 

Wow

 

Yeah lol...the milky way was so unbelievably visible to the naked eye. I was in that spot for 2 hours just gazing.

 

Those star shots are sick

 

I wish I was able to take pictures remotely as cool as these haha

 

Excellent shots.
Its hard to see the sky here as clear as that, something I miss where I used to live other side of the state.

light saber looks dangerous off road too.

 

Thanks bro

They're actually not as difficult as they look...in fact, anybody with a DSLR capable of taking a 30 second exposure shot can do it. It inspires me to do a whole write-up on it since for some reason, people think it takes a lot of skill haha

 

Thanks! hahaha yeah the LED whip is BeeRadd's creation, we built 3 of them in his garage using LED strips and dummy firestik antennas. The long exposure makes my truck look like a true "Toy-Yoda"

 

Nice lightsaber! haha Awesome pics though!

 

What did you use to illuminate the trucks themselves in the second half of pictures? It looks like you have a white light shining straight down on them or something. It looks really cool

 

Well I wasn't really prepared to take photos like these (unpreparedness usually leads some of my best photos lol), so I improvised. I had my tripod with me, but the goons at work took the base off the bottom of my camera so I couldn't really use the tripod. I ended up burying the battery grip of my camera (lower section) into the sand, using my fish-eye ultra wide angle 10mm so the shots show a lot of the sand between the camera and the truck.

I took a few photos of just the trucks without any lighting for 30 seconds to see how much the natural or ambient light would reflect off of them. Ended up not being much at all light on the trucks, just a silhouette with an amazing shot of the sky.

Improvising, I reached into my pocket and used the LED on my iPhone's flashlight app to "flash" the trucks. The cutoff line from my Otterbox phone case formed a perfect circle of light emitting from the single LED, and I just aimed it to encompass the truck and some of the sand around it. Set the camera, 10 seconds timer so my finger on the shutter wouldn't move it, took the 30 second photo, and within that period I flashed the trucks for 1-2 seconds tops. That's all the light the lens needed to provide a good exposure without showing the trucks too dark, or washed out. It took some trial and error to hold the LED at the right spot as to not show a shadow of the camera itself on the ground, but after about 5 min, I had the procedure dialed in and then began to get a little more creative with the angles.

 

So freakin awesome pics! My truck is in those pics somewhere! Beautiful sky last night on that run and you captured it perfectly

 

That's awesome. I don't have a dslr but my friend has a really nice nikon, and he was showing me how he can take 30 sec exposure shots. So I may need to borrow it from him...