Sparkler Art | St. Paul Photographer

Today I went kayaking for the first time with my sister and some of my girlie pals. We went on the Kinnickinnic River, departing from River Falls, WI. It was a little on the brutal side. The river is quite low so we hit lots of rocks and spent lots of time emptying kayaks full of water. The worst thing, though, is no cameras! That’s the second time in two weeks that I’ve had great photo ops that I couldn’t photograph. Earlier, my sister’s fiance graduated from the prison guard training program at Lino Lakes Minnesota Correctional Facility and we got to attend the graduation and take a tour of the prison campus. But sometimes mental photos just have to suffice, I guess. (Seriously, the image of the proximity of prison toilet to prison bed and prison roommate is permanently burned into my mind.)

In any case, in the meantime, here are some various works of art from the Fourth of July party we had in our backyard.

(That’s me!)

These type of photos aren’t hard to do if you have a camera with manual settings. You’ll want to wait until it’s pretty dark because you’ll need to do a long exposure. For these photos, I varied between 5sec and 30sec exposures, depending on what people wanted to draw. You may want to keep your aperture pretty stopped down if you’re getting in too much light. I think I did most of these at 9.0? And you’ll probably want a tripod, although I did these by setting the camera on my lap. And a super secret hint…the artists don’t have to draw their name backwards…you can flip it later in Photoshop. :)

Lots of destinations with good photo ops tomorrow, here’s hoping I can walk! And that the bed doesn’t rock ALL night long.