Every time I do photography near the Mississippi or when I lived in Burnsville of the Minnesota River, I always had the saying “One world, one soul, time pass, the river rolls” run through my head from a song.
Tonight I was working at the office and killing time while waiting for some footage to encode. Yes I finally have private office space that I rent to keep the business out of the home and the work out of the home to try and have a somewhat normal life.
Right behind the office is the Mississippi River and when I say right behind, I mean you walk about 50 yards down a dirt path and you are at the rivers edge. I explored the path a few months back before the first snow fall and thought it would make a great walking path and photo opportunity one day. Well that one day, or night was here and my editing computer told me it would take about 45 minutes for a video to render before I could start the upload to my agent and go home. What to do for 45 minutes? I could watch infomercials at two in the morning but I thought what could I do? That is when I remembered it was a full moon out and I had the path down to the river right behind the studio.
After a short phone call to Neva to make sure she knew I would not be doing anything stupid like walking out into the middle of the river on thin ice to get a photograph, I was off to the rivers edge, to walk on so so ice that was only a couple of inches thick to get some great photographs.
The scene was perfect along the river for the photo that I have pictured in my mind before walking down to the spot. The moon was lighting up the area and the river was calm with a nice ledge of ice to walk on along the side of the river.
(Note, click on the image to see the larger image on all of these photographs)
I was using the new 10mm lens at F5 with a thirty second exposure at 400 ISO to get a ghostly like image with the stars out but looking like daylight out at the same time.
I used my red head lamp to fill the white sow to make the scene look blood red. This is some old school burning and dodge while the camera was taking a 30 second exposure at F5 with a 10mm lens. While taking this photograph, I could hear a bird on the other side of the river or on the island calling out. It was pretty spooky because it sounded like an Eagle calling out in the middle of the night.
Below is the same shot but without me filling the scene with the red fill light. That is correct, the photo above is filled in during the photo, not after with Photoshop.
The level in the camera said it was level but it is still higher on the right for some reason in the photo below. This is also at F4, 10MM for Thirty Seconds at 400 ISO with the full moon just a little behind me over my head.
And the last photo is right at the rivers and ice edge looking out towards an island in the middle of the river. The ice was a few inches thick here but the river was only a few inches deep here so it was safe to get this shot.
