Wiebe's Wanderings: Tubac - Lighting of the Luminaries

Started off this morning with our usual hike, Lori did some laundry and I hit the gym. 100 squats, 45 bench press, rows, kickbacks and a few others thrown in before I ran out of gas. Lori's Fitbit says we did 18000 steps today between our hike and the Tubac visit. I may not be able to move tomorrow but I've got to drop a few pounds.
You may wonder what luminaries are. I certainly did when Lori started talking about them. Take a paper bag, put some sand in the bottom, add a small candle, once its dark, light the candle. Do this a few thousand times and you have the Lighting of the Luminaries in Tubac, Az.

Tubac is a small town about an hour south of Tucson, just north of the US/Mexico border. The town is filled with little artist/craft shops and each year at this time they have their Lighting of the Luminaries event which is a very well publicized way to kickoff the Christmas shopping season. Lots of shops and restaurants with some street entertainers. We took the Rincon Tour Bus which is free for most events unless its more than 100 miles round trip. The cost for this trip was $15.00 each.

This is one of the passengers on the trip. A case of the blind leading the blind you might ask. Actually one of the residents trains service dogs and this is her latest student who unfortunately has a degenerative eye condition which could lead to blindness if it gets too much exposure to the sun. The dog was very well behaved and never tried to remove the goggles.

Tubac has so many shops with so many neat things to look at it was all a little overwhelming. Lori had a bit of a "deer in the headlights" look. There were paintings, pottery, sculptures, metal work, blankets and on and on it went. As I was walking through the pottery section all I could think was my mother, who ran a Ceramic Studio for about 30 years, would have just loved this place. In fact if it wasn't for the fact that we would of had to cart the stuff around with us for the next 4 months I think I would have bought a couple of items.

I think they used every colour possible. A few of these would have looked great in our flower beds at home.

Each of the shops were setting up their bags and as dusk approached they were going around lighting the candle in each bag. Some had gone high tech and had little electric candles in the bags but most were old style candles. As darkness descended the effect became apparent. Unfortunately the streets were lined with parked cars with many more cars driving up and down the streets. The lights from the cars plus all the parked cars in front of the stores kind of detracted from the effect.

Same building later that night. 15 sec exposure at f5.6, ISO 100

In some of the night exposures you might see a ghostly figure in the shot. Some people stopped when they saw I was shooting. I just told them to keep walking, the faster the better.

Again same location but at 1/2 sec, f5.6 and 800 ISO. The guy and his dog kept pretty still for me.

Night picture is 15 sec, f5.6 and 100 ISO.
This one had the most luminaries although I think they cheated with the ones on the building and roof and went electric.

The truck was at 13 sec, f5.6 and ISO 125. Never done much night photography but its kind of cool. Will have to experiment more with this. Definitely a trial and error thing but at least with digital its the same cost for 1 picture or 100 and enhancing the picture is much easier on the computer than in the darkroom.
This also gave me the chance to justify the cost of my new tripod.