Florida State Fair

  Yesterday I went to the Florida State Fair for the first time. I have never seen so many rides or concession stands!  It put any carnival I have ever been to to shame that is for sure! I did not eat any of the many deep fried offerings but have to admit some of them smelled pretty good!  For some reason the most poplar prize at the fair seemed to be these Jamaican looking bananas!

  I really don't get it! Here are a few other photos I took during the day-it is the night photos however that I am really excited about!

  It was a beautiful day and a wonderful night as well.  This was my first time photographing lights like this at night and I had a lot of fun learning how to get it right!  The best subjects were the ferris wheels.

  These were all taken using my tripod at shutter speeds of 2.5 or 3 seconds. Results differed based on how fast the wheel was moving. I did very little with these in Lightroom/Photoshop except to increase the brightness and vibrance.

  Later I captured the shot below of the same wheel from across the festival grounds.

  It is so fascinating how the camera sees 3 seconds of movement as opposed to how our eyes do! 

  It was so much fun to set the timer, let the camera do its thing and then see what popped up on the screen, usually I know what it should look like, here with lights and so much movement each exposure was to some extent a surprise!

  This is one of those rides where you sit in a swing and are whirled round and round. The lighter swirls you see are the swings believe it or not! I love the way this looks pretty much like a crazy mushroom about to blast into space!

  Same ride but during this exposure the lights were red!  This was so much fun!  Below are another set of Ferris Wheel photos, a different one this time.

  

Finally I leave you with a photo I did play with in Photo Shop, I used the HDR toning filter on this one and really like the effect I was able to achieve!  

  Looks like I was walking around in some kind of crazy futuristic sci-fi movie!  I can see from now on I will showing up at whatever carnivals pop up in the area to capture more images like these!  The Florida State Fair at the Fairgrounds off of I-4 runs through this coming Monday!