Night shooting can be a lot of fun – not just in getting wacky results like the image above, but it’s a lot of fun to just improvise who’s in the shot and what you want to do and if you have nontraditional light sources (like the car lights running down the street and the barely registering glow stick on a string in my daughter’s hand).

Just screwing around with a long shutter speed and a flash can yield some really cool stuff. Hence the photo above (6 seconds, f11 and ISO 400). A lot can happen in six seconds – after the flash froze us we moved out of those poses, the car came past the house with only its lights captured, and the tree leaves and houses across the street were captured nicely.

It’s common for us to think that cameras capture “reality” – actually, they capture a reality our human eyes never see. It’s pretty cool stuff whose possibilities are as endless as your willingness to discover. Gotta love it!

– TMulloy