Now what's this all about?: Late nights

are becoming way more familiar to me than ever before, but that's okay. :) I was starting to work on some of the shots that we got at the pit (such as the one I let you peak at on last night's post), but I really just wasn't feeling like working on it. There are several sequences of shots that I'm going to eventually post on here frame by frame, but it takes a lot of effort, there are about 60 or so images.
So, I decided to have just a little more fun with my shutter and remote (to take pictures)- I'm really just playing with all the controls on my camera and trying to get used to them. For instance, many wonder, as did I, what the ISO is on a camera. Like, what it Really does. Skip the scientific blahh, it allows your camera to take in more light at once which is useful on several different levels, such as shooting in the dark. Here's my example:

Yes, among many other random things, we have a big metal cock in our house (insert immature pun here). The lights were on in the kitchen behind me but were off in the living room, where the cock is, so it was actually really dark, which, btw, we should quickly define as the lack of light (kind of like in math we solve everything in the terms of a certain variable, such as x, it sometimes helps to think about this the same way. We are dealing with AMOUNTS of light, dark is lacking light, a shadow is an area where there is little to no light and a highlight is an area where there is an extensive amount of reflected light. Something I have think about whenever looking at a scene. If you draw, you can relate the concept of light and dark to positive and negative space- light being positive and dark being negative, think about it.) ANYway, the point to this is that I set a low ISO on the first image, around 200, a mid ISO on the second one, around 1000, and a slightly higher one to the third, around 1400. Please note that some cameras can go up to 6000+, I just decided to not exhaust the point by going that high. Lesson learned. For me, anyway.

Road-side Self-Portrait

This is Highway 49, where I live, at the end of my driveway. I decided to be extremely cliche and take some pictures of vehicles. I got a lot of really awesome shots and it was difficult for me to choose a couple to show on here, but check em out:

When the shutter is left open, it captures light and it requires a certain length of time of an object staying still in order to catch it in the frame Unless it is lit up by some kind of light. In the example above, I left open the shutter and the head lights of the car and everything that the lights lit up got caught, but the vehicle itself did not, hence a streak from the headlights- the same thing with the next couple of pictures. The stars are awesome in this, though.