Words and Light

David challenged us to find another sequence for Picture Story for today. I hoped to emulate my earlier sequence and to expand on the Columbia nightlife. When work ran late on both Friday and Saturday nights, I was left with only Sunday.

So, Jeff and I went to Rocheport.

Along the Katy Trail.

My plan was to photograph the sun setting over the Missouri River, along the Katy Trail. Using the D3’s intervalometer, I did photograph the sunset at one frame every 20 seconds, but because I had been in such a hurry to set up my tripod, my framing was off.

This is one of the photos in the sequence, but after I straightened and cropped it according to the horizon line.

So I quickly switched up my tripod and exposure settings and shot another sequence as the sun’s light faded away. I shot on manual exposure at ISO 320, f/5 and 1/250, and took one frame every 20 seconds for almost 20 minutes.

The frames below were shot three minutes apart and do well to represent the passage of time.

On an aside note, I lost my glasses after this sequence was taken.The dilemma: I can’t legally drive without glasses. It wasn’t pitch dark yet, so Jeff and I searched for them with no success. When it was too dark to see well, we went back to the car, where we discovered I didn’t have a flashlight.

So we walked around Rocheport and ended up knocking on the door of a small house. The elderly lady who lived there seemed suspicious of our reason for being on the trail around/past sunset, but she lent us a flashlight. We found my glasses within five minutes of returning to that spot on the trail. Hurray!

I haven’t had a chance to throw the images into any video-editing software to create a time-lapse video, but I’m hoping to do that soon.