There was no Loathing this weekend but plenty of Love at the Las Vegas Steem Creators Conference. Maybe a touch of Fear too right before I went on stage for my presentation but with all the love and support from the other awesome steemians in the room, the fear quickly went away.

The weekend was amazing. Friendships and memories were made that will hopefully last a lifetime. Sadly, the event did have to end and on Sunday evening I found myself alone, with my camera for company. I decided to go walk the strip and get some fun psychedelic looking photos. It's a technique that I have played with before, but it had been a while and it was really fun to loosen up and get creative with.

(click the images to view larger)

These photos were shot on a Canon 5dsr with a 24-105mm lens, all handheld, no tripod, no flash, no filters. They are all single exposures and the psychidelic look was achieved in the camera, not in Photoshop. They were all shot at ISO 320, a somewhat middle of road ISO. Most of these were one-second exposures, I needed the longer exposure time for this technique. The aperture varied depending on how bright the lights were, somewhere between f10 and f22. I didn't want to go wide open with the aperture so I could retain a decent depth of field.

Here's the tricky part of the technique. During the long exposure, I zoomed the lens and moved the camera a bit. I start out trying to keep the camera as still as possible during the first half of the one-second long exposure. Then I zoomed the lens fast for the second half of the exposure. For some of the shots I started out with the lens set at a wide angle of 24mm, then I zoomed to 105mm. For some of them it was opposite, where I started out at 105mm, then zoomed out wide. I always tried to make sure the main subject matter was in focus when I started the shot. This technique requires a lot of experimenting and taking many many exposures, making slight adjustments each time in order to end up with a "keeper" shot. I actually shot 179 photos while out there and only ended up with 13 keeper shots. The images were shot in RAW format and processed in Adobe Photoshop's Camera Raw feature. A decent ammount of dodging and burning was done in order to darken and lighten some of the streaky lights.

"Las Vegas Lights 5"

"Las Vegas Lights 2"

"Las Vegas Lights 6"

"Las Vegas Lights 10"

"Las Vegas Lights 11"

"Las Vegas Lights 12"

This look is not for everyone, I get that. But I like it and that's what's really important, haha! It's a great way to "break the rules" and have fun with photography. Experiment! Play!

What do you think of the look? And if you do like it, which image is your favorite?

Please look for Part 2 of this post tomorrow (click follow if you don't want to miss it). I'll be posting 6 more shots...
Large limited edition fine art prints, printed by me personally, available. Click the image titles for info.

Thank you for looking and reading!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography

More of my Steem Creators Conference posts: