"Bent and Twisted" by Wes Aldridge
This shot is from Demonbreun St. hotspot and Nashville-favorite bar, The Tin Roof. I was bone dry sober when I snapped this one, just watching (or as someone I know calls it "stalking") the mindlessly ripped and belligerent plastered 20-somethings have a grand ol' time drinking the night away. I saw this girl swaying back and forth, spilling her glass of beer with every movement and thought, "hmmm, wonder what is going through her brain right now?"
Multi-colored Christmas lights hung above her head on the bar's namesake tin roof. I saw her looking up at them as she did her silly, unbalanced back-and-forth stagger as the band played a cover of "Brown Eyed Girl." This was the moment, this was the ticket.
I set a slow 1/40th of a second shutter speed and wide 1.8 aperture with my cheap 50mm lens and panned in an arc motion during the long exposure. The streaking lights must have been the dreadfully tortured sight her eyes beheld. Anyway, it was just fun imagining a second of someone else's life.
3 comments:
This is deep! Thinking about a second of someone else's life. Very nice photograph. Did you do the arc motion with your camera? Or was the girl and the christmas lights goning in an arc motion?
denbaat: I moved the camera in an arcing motion. The long exposure time coupled with the cameras movement allows light to streak across your film or digital sensor in your camera and leave lines tracing where the light first appeared in the exposure and ended. I didn't include the girl in the photograph, she was only an inspirational point of the creative process of the shot. I had another thought: What if I would have used another long exposure and centered her in frame and allowed the arc to move around her and fired a 2nd curtain sync flash at the end of the exposure. She would have appeared solid in the center of the arc. Ah, the privelege of hindsight.
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