One of my favorite pastimes in Northlandia is to grab the camera and head out in the wee hours of the morning to experiment. As I have said many times I am still learning everything that my camera is capable of; I don't know how good a student I am, its more miss than hit. But like the good soldier I am, I dust myself off and keep heading out into the trenches. I made four trips to New Boston and Keithsburg hoping to continue to learn the facets of light, or lack of, and a moving object: nighttime pictures of a moving barge.
In the next few weeks I'll post some of those pictures. These are the first.
There is a floating dock just off shore. I found this to be a pretty good place to set up my tripod. It wasn't too wobbly and it put me out into the action, so to speak. The grain elevator is to one side of the dock while the two boat ramps are on the other.
The picture above shows the layout and was kind of a nice shot in its own right. The moon is trying to peek out in a cloudy sky, the red light in the elevators dump area, the street light reflecting off trees to the left and the faint city light over on the right which is likely from Burlington, Iowa.
On the other side is the park and viewing area including the newly placed wood stature of Chief Blackhawk. There is a small island on the right and of course a look at the floating dock.
Straight ahead is the Mississippi and the route the barges take. I included this picture because of the bugs/mayflies/whatever they are buzzing around that were unseen to me in real time. However, in this timed shutter you can clearly see them becaobject(s) use of the reflection of the moon. This would have been a three or four second exposure.
These guys would also make sense of what I was hearing as I stood out not he dock. Besides the owls in the woods, I kept hearing fish breach. Making a supposition I'd say the fish were lapping up these bugs when they hit the water.
This is the small island that was just off shore. The lighting source is from he park area and boat ramps. If you look just under the shore line of the island in center-left you see about three small floating objects.
I couldn't figure out what they were at first because they would move around. I thought perhaps some geese at first. It ended up a recurring thing with every trip. They are fluffy, effluvia stirred up by something floating in the river. Could they be from the churning waters from the lock and dam?
More from these trips later.
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