Interesting and excellent shots! Where was it when you got these?
I took these last night. It's a travelling fair that goes up and down the eastern US seaboard. Currently they are in Levittown, PA which is @30 minutes north of Philadelphia, or for those in New Jersey, it's maybe 5-10 minutes across the river from Trenton.
Here is their home page--from there you can access a 'Locations' link.
Reithoffer Shows | The Aristocrat of Show Business There are 2 different fairs--they classify them as
orange or
blue. This was an orange category (I have no idea why they use colors). I *think* the blue fair uses a somewhat smaller ferris wheel; however, I don't know if the other ferris wheel is equipped with these LED lights.
It would be neat to make a collage of all your shots together. Whats the general settings/lens?
Almost all of my shots were with a Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 lens (tripod mounted). I took a few with my Nikon 70-200mm 4.5-5.6 but found 70mm was plenty long. In fact, most were taken under 70mm, and all the ones taken from last night that are attached here were with the Sigma 24-70mm. All are ISO 100 with a D600.
Last year when I took the Ferris Wheel photos with their older lights, I shot in manual mode and tried to keep my shutter speed between 4 to 6 seconds by varying the aperture to control the amount of light. This year I was a dodo and completely forgot to use manual mode so I was in aperture priority (which is my main shooting mode) but was keeping an eye on my shutter speed. I prefer this year's photos that were taken with faster shutter speeds--when I say faster, I mean somewhere between 1-2 seconds rather than ones I took longer than 2 seconds. However, as I just stated, last year's photos with the older lights worked better with 4-6 second exposures, but I didn't care for this year's photos with longer than 2 second exposures. The difference in lights significantly changed the outcome of the photos.
Take a look at the green swirly attached photo. For some reason the camera got 'stuck' with the shutter open, and I had to turn the camera off to stop it. That one is 12.3 seconds at f/18.
The purple swirly attached photo was shot at 6 seconds using f/18. Neither of these photos has the really deep colors compared to the photos with the faster shutter speeds, and I've bumped up the color slightly in all the photos.
The third attached photo turned out really odd. Certainly not great by any means, and didn't do any editing to remove street lights or anything--just using it as an example for you. It was shot at only 1/2 second using f/4. Part of it depends upon how fast the ferris wheel is moving. If they are loading/unloading cars, then 1-2 seconds won't produce much movement. If the wheel is going around for its ride, I preferred 1-2 second shutter speeds.
