I’m often confronted with a scene that seems just a bit more than ordinary but I can’t put my finger on it. I sometimes try to capture it through photography, but the image seldom results in that same feeling I remember at the original moment. Over the past few days and nights, I’ve gone to the same places at the same times and repeated my shots, in the hope that I might find the settings needed to capture both the image and the feeling of “it’s just a little different”.

Here are three results. None of these have been “photoshopped” other than to crop, scale down the images for the blog, and add the drop-shadow effect.

The inspiration for this shot was two fold. First, the sodium vapor safety light is usually the bane of my existence at night when I want to look at the stars or just enjoy the general lack of man’s impact on the environment. However, the light is there and I can not turn it off so I thought how I might use it to my advantage. Shot at ISO1600, F8, 32 seconds.

This is not a trick and as noted, this is not a composite. The water in the creek for the past two mornings has been very still. In prior years this has lead me to take the “mirror image shot” where the top nearly perfectly matches the bottom. However, this time, I photographed only the bottom half – the reflection – and I turned my camera upside down.  Shot at ISO800, F13, 1/750 sec.

Here is another example. Like the previous image, this was taken with my camera inverted. Shot at ISO800, F11, 1/500 sec.