A PERSONAL RENDERING--

of the Ferris Wheel at our county fair

This gently circling ride was invented by a Pittsburgh engineer, George W. Ferris, for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  It remains a staple of theme parks and amusement midways all across our land. That's one pictured above and right in slightly warped presentations by the slightly warped mind of this blog's author.

We had just finished a square dance demonstration at the Richland County fair when I was attracted to the south end of the midway by this very colorful ride.

It's lights streaked and flashed and changed color as it anchored the visual mayhem of the fair's midway.

For stability, I squeezed my Canon Rebel T3i digital camera against a nearby utility pole and explored exposures measured in seconds, and long fractions thereof, using extremely small apertures to avoid over exposure as the ride's velocity went up and down and lighting romped across the spectrum.

About half of my 16 exposures made it to the computer's hard drive and this two of them were totally abused in Photoshop Element's incredible, photo editing software.

Just as an abstract artist might splash paint across a canvass a digital photographer can do similarly by manipulating the near infinite quantity of pixels from his camera's pallet.

The camera records an image already manipulated toward the limits of the photographer's creative ability, then the computer and software take over and have the capability to do things to the basic image that were unimaginable a few years ago.

Here are the original images.  The left one was done as an exposure test while the ride was staging.  It morphed into the lead photo above compliments of the software.

The one on the right is a one second exposure at f/22 and ISO 400.  The streaked lights you are seeing represent the distance the individual lights moved during that one second of time. 

It morphed into the small image upper right by my fiddling with various components of the software--that I can neither precisely identify nor ever exactly repeat.  The creative process simply oozes along until the artist is mostly pleased by the result but never sure if it is complete--or not.