Brickblog

I love happy accidents. When they happen, you think wow, why didn’t I think of purposely doing that. While playing with lighting last night I accidentally hit the zoom ring on my lens. What came out of it was a pretty badly ghosted image, but it showed potential. Now, I’m sure I’ve seen this technique before, so I know I’m not bringing anything wild and new to the world of photography, however it did look neat and was kind of fun to try to get right.

Basically, I threw my camera on a tripod, turned out all the lights except what remains on our Christmas tree and set the shutter speed to a second or two. Once I released the shutter, I let the focal length sit for a ’second, then twisted the controls to zoom in on the tree. After a lot of experimenting, with how fast, how much, etc, I accomplished an effect that looked like the tree exploding from the center, or the lights shooting out like lasers while the rest of the room looks blurry, but normal.

Shown here is my personal favorite. It links to a gallery of 4, which I may add the other experiments later, but I think these sum up about 40-50 pictures well.