The Story Behind the Photo:

September 2021: Long Exposure

by Jim Grasley

Assignment: Long Exposure

Photo: Light painting at the Tacoma Glass Museum

Sony A7iii with Sony 28-75mm f2.8 lens

It was a busy Saturday (July 15) for me and I didn’t get home until around 6 p.m. This was the day for our club’s field trip headed by Scott Southern to Tacoma for Street Photography with a blur.

I arrived at the Washington State History Museum just in time to get instructions from Scott around 7:30 p.m. There were quite a few club members who attended. Scott had mentioned that at the end of the evening, there would be a “Surprise”.

We all went about our business of capturing images. Steilacoom High School was having their Homecoming event at the Glass Museum so there were lots of subjects. Eventually, it started to get dark so we could capture some photos of moving trams and cars with longer shutter speeds.

Just before 10 p.m., the “Surprise” was revealed. Guest photographer Danny Crelling from Tacoma did some remarkable light painting. I think he did just two setups - one at 9:56 and the other at 10:03, according to my camera EXIF settings.

I scrambled to get the first photo and quickly set my shutter speed at 15 seconds with my 28-75mm lens. Tripod mounted, of course. The Washington State History Museum was in the background on my first attempt. The sparklers that Danny used threw light everywhere but my photo did not get the full arch of the lighting in my frame and I didn’t care for the lighting in the background.

For the second and last photo, I used the same settings. However, I moved to a different place to capture the apartments behind the glass museum. That also moved the position of the moon that was lighting the sky that night.

Next came the hard part – post processing. For whatever reason, my camera was set in the jpeg mode, rather than RAW that I normally would use. The winning photo was taken at 38mm at f6.3 and ISO of 125 for 15 sec.

Once I adjusted the light settings to bring out the color, I needed to straighten out the background buildings. On the original image, the iconic 90-foot-high hot house silver cone was too dark and the floodlights at the base created a white lighting blowout. I made adjustments to fix these issues.