Painting is just another way of keeping a diary ~Pablo Picasso

Friday, September 3, 2010

September 3

We had this neat opportunity tonight to watch the bats fly out from beneath the Yolo Bypass I-80 Bridge.  There are an estimated 150,000 bats that fly out each night, and they only emerge from this one spot, flying right over this tree.  Evidentally this makes for a safer exit.  I have a bunch of pictures of this, but I decided to post this one with the bike in it.  The bike is actually strapped to the top of a car heading east on I-80, but it's perfectly lined up with the bridge wall.  I was working in aperture, as is my bad habit, so all my photos are f/5.6.  In this particular photo my camera read much lower light, so it's only 1/80 and the bats are a little blurry.  (Luckily traffic on I-80 was crawling along because of the holiday weekend so the bike isn't too blurry!)  I really debated about posting this one because I didn't want to detract from the bats, but I just couldn't help myself.  I still think the bats look really cool, and the bike adds to the photo.
f/5.6, 1/80, 55mm, vivid

1 comment:

Katie Brown said...

Hi Melissa,

This is a beautiful photo! I was wondering if you had an email address I could contact you with? I am interested in obtaining rights for usage in a video project, and I would love to speak with you further and give you some more information. If you could send me an mail at k_brown@aperturefilms.com, that would be great. I look forward to hearing from you! Thanks :)