Day 59—Getting Down To The Nuts And Bolts

Today’s challenge theme is “very big.” When I decided the 75 pound weights at the gym weren’t “big” enough for this challenge, one of my gym buddies suggested I photograph the bright red 80 foot steel sculpture that is seen from I-80 near the Roseville Auto Mall. Apparently, it is supposed to look like a rose when viewed from above and I was intrigued when Cheryl suggested it might look like a rose when viewed from below as well, if I lay on the ground and pointed my camera up. It’s not too far away so off I went. The first thing I discovered is that the sculpture is called Cosmos, and although it is dedicated to the people of Roseville, I can’t see that it could possibly look like a rose from above and the view from below was blocked by large steel sculpture pieces, so I’ll probably never know. I took a few photos from various angles and it looks sort of big but it doesn’t really loom enough in the photos. What struck me as VERY big are the nuts and bolts that anchor this sculpture. I didn’t measure them but they’ve got to be at least six inches in diameter. . . really big nuts and bolts. Maybe they’re not as big as the nuts and bolts that I photographed at the Space Needle in Seattle last year but they’re still really big nuts and bolts. Besides, they’re bright red and shiny and how often do you see shiny, bright red nuts and bolts? This closeup photo however, doesn’t include any reference point so you’ll have to take my word for it that they’re REALLY big nuts and bolts.

Today I experimented with setting my ISO to “auto” after reading a Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond) post about it this morning. I like to keep noise in my photos to a minimum so I usually keep my ISO set to 100, but I have discovered that my photos are frequently underexposed and it’s possible that’s due to my fixation about a low ISO. I’m more comfortable (I think) letting the camera adjust my ISO rather than either shutter or aperture and I limited the auto setting to a maximum ISO of 400 because I’ve read that noise in digital photos doesn’t show up much until the ISO is above 400 and when I was shooting 35mm film, I almost always used ISO 400 film because of its speed. Most of the shots I took around the sculpture today were bumped up to ISO 200 (maybe that should tell me something) but the photo I’m posting today was bumped up to 400. I”ll have to experiment with different exposure settings and lenses before I determine whether this will be a permanent change.

Focal Length 200mm
ISO 400
f/11
1/200
SOOC