I was looking for an opportunity to post some pictures from another excursion I took over to Longwood Gardens to photograph their "Lights" exhibits. Since we're in-between the New York City and Vero Beach portions of the trip report, it seems like a perfect time for a little Intermission.
In an earlier post I gave you a link to Longwood Gardens, and as you can imagine it's known for all of the beautiful plants, fountains, and um, gardens. But anyway, this year somebody came up with the fantastic idea to have an artist, Bruce Munro, put up different light exhibits
Longwood Lights link. We visited it a month or so ago and I took a monopod along, but even with that, the long shutter speeds required to get good pictures usually resulted in blurry pictures. So, I went back about a week ago with a tripod, to try again. I thought you might like to see the results.
I started out in a forest area, where it got dark first, at about 7:30. The shutter for this picture was open for about a third of a second.
You can see that they put out oodles of these things, glass balls with a light filament inside.
I did a little bit of tweaking on Intagram (follow me -- glennbo123) with that last one.
Then I hustled over to a pond where they had a bunch more of those same lights.
I did some Instagram-tweaking to one I took which was similar to that last one:
Then I went over to the meadow, where they had these stacks of water bottles with lights inside that change color. I know it's hard to imagine with just that description, so as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And in this case, that's a bargain!
By this point, I had to leave the shutter open for over 3 seconds, so the tripod was a must.
Now it was time to get creative...how could I get a portrait of myself with these things? The shutter had to be open 3+ seconds to get lights and their beautiful color, but it wouldn't illuminate me. If I used the flash, it washed out the color of the lights. So I devised a plan to use the flashlight app on my iPhone, which I held out to the side, to douse myself with a little light. I held my thumb over the light and just uncovered it for a split-second and then covered it back up again. Then got up when the camera shutter closed. It took lots and lots of attempts to get a good shot, but it was a fun experiment.
Oh, and I'm sure I looked pretty crazy doing it, because other people were walking around, admiring the lights also. I heard one guy say, "Oh, do you see what he's doing? He's putting just enough light on himself to be in the picture." So, maybe I didn't look too crazy.
I put a couple of these shots into Instagram to play around with them. Did I mention you can follow me on Instagram? I'm glennbo123 on there also.
I probably should have shaved that day. Oh well, I didn't realize I was going to be doing a photo shoot!
Then I moved further away to try to capture the whole exhibit of the meadow lights.
I couldn't quite get the focus right for that one, but at least it gives you a sense for the exhibit.
But the focus was just about right for playing around with my iPhone flashlight trick...
Then I headed for the exit, but just as I was about to leave I heard that there was a fountain show that just started. These were the big fountains, not the smaller ones that were in my earlier post. So I went over to get some more pictures. It went on for about 20 minutes, so I took a bunch of pictures of these, but they're not really all that different so I'll just give you a couple.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed our Intermission!
Up next: Travel Day
Not quite! First an Intermission Part 2
Link to next chapter
Drives me crazy, but I love her. 
I'm glad you enjoyed it and hope that you get that mother-daughter trip someday. 
We've texted a little during the week, but we'll probably talk to her tomorrow to catch up on how things are going.
). But I have been reading along and enjoyed Lauren's TR about NYC very much!
