Where I explain what the hell that was

Light, water and memory
Deerfield Beach, FL, December 2011

Earlier today, I posted this picture and asked you what the hell it was. You're all excellent guessers, and I'm glad you had such a good time with it. Turns out you were all pretty darn close. Here's the deal:

We were sitting poolside watching the kinderlings swim in the mostly darkened pool. Being Canadians in a strange land, they were happy to swim after dark, long after the locals had gone inside and tucked in for the night. It was New Year's Eve, and the Canucks didn't much care that it was nowhere near warm enough to go for a dip. Annals of parenting, no?

As the kids swam, I found myself fidgeting with my camera, concerned about not having something unique to remember this night. I wandered to the other side of the pool and found myself staring at the reflected light - from above and under the water's surface - and thinking how neat it would be to shoot it in the abstract.

The answer hit me pretty quickly: Relatively long exposures - 2 to 4 seconds would do it - combined with sweeping the camera in a constant-speed arc from left to right. I've tried this painting-with-light experiment before, but was never happy with the outcome. Time to change that. So while my wife and our cousins chatted poolside, I started waving my camera around. I'm sure had anyone seen me, they would have called security.

Thankfully they didn't. Thankfully we returned home with as many children as we had when we left. Thankfully I ended up with a neat new set of abstracts to enjoy. And an additional incentive to continue shooting weirdly well into 2012.

Your turn: Do you do oddball things with your camera? Do tell!