Fayetteville Parks and Recreation's Lights of the Ozarks
If the weather is cold, you know its about time for the Square to Shine. This year, 400,000 lights
that stretch 46 miles will light up the Fayetteville Square during the Holiday Season. The Lights
of the Ozarks is sponsored by Fayetteville Parks and Recreation and the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce.
The light show runs every night from November 26 until New Year’s Eve.
Pictures like the ones on this page and in the attached gallery are made possible by Time-Exposure.
Unsurprisingly, exposure simply means allowing light to strike your
film. The tricky part is knowing how much light you need and how
to control the amount of light reaching the film. The former is
taken care of by a light meter, usually built in to the camera,
and the latter is achieved by means of the aperture and shutter
controls on your camera.
The aperture is just a hole whose size can be varied to allow
more or less light to pass through it. The size of apertures are
expressed in f-numbers. You can calculate an f-number, if you are
keen or don't have much of a life, by dividing the lens focal length
by the diameter of the aperture. A typical aperture range
may look like this:
The smaller the f-number is then the larger the aperture is and
the more light it will pass.
The shutter prevents light from reaching the film until the
moment of exposure. Shutter speeds are expressed in seconds or fractions of a second.
Slow shutter speeds like those used for time exposures run into seconds.
1sec; 1/2sec; 1/4sec; 1/8th; 1/ 15th; 1/30th; 1/60th; 1/125th
As bright as Christmas Lights look to us against a dark sky,
they are not so bright that most films can record them in a blink of an eye. If you were to
set your exposure for, say, 1/500th, the exposure may also be too brief to record any image at all!
How long is long enough? With ISO 100 or faster film, a one-second exposure should be sufficient, however
exposures of 8 sec to 30 seconds will produce spectacular images.
Time exposures are fun but require a good tripod, as any movement will
create a blurred image. Look through the gallery for examples of various exposures, including using the zoom
lens during exposure to produce Fake Fireworks from the lights.
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