Photoblog 2.0

Wan Hai 505, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

For our second night of shooting in my night photography workshop we left the dark hills and went down to Port Oakland. Oakland is one of the busiest industrial ports on the West coast, and even in the darkness a giant container ship (the Wan Hai 505 shown in this photo) was loading. Moist air and varied light sources combined to create eerie effects, and everyone came back with great photos and a different take on this photographically interesting area.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms), circular polarizer, 15 seconds at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Spirits of the Night, photo by David Joseph-Goteiner.

If you weren’t at the digital night photography workshop I gave over the weekend here in Berkeley and on location in nearby Port Oakland, then you’re like most of the world. This was a workshop attended by a small, select group of hardcore photographers dedicated to the pursuit of extreme darkness, heedless of wind, cold, and danger!

Proof of the talent, fun, and general wackiness of this event: on Friday night, socked in with fog on the top of Wildcat Peak, David, a gifted High School student, turned to painting with light using our flash lights, with the twenty second exposure above one of his results.

Star Circles 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is my second forty minute exposure of stars circling over the Point Reyes the other night. The original version was horizontal. As this exposure progressed, low-flying clouds were sweeping across the sky, softening and darkening the scene. At the extreme left of the photo, a working boat on Tomales Bay flooded the scene with light. Time passed.

On a technical note, it’s pretty tough to accurately gauge exposures from the LCD at night because the display compensates. It might look decent on the screen, and still be four stops underexposed. So the exposure histogram is a better way to tell if your exposure is in the ball park. It’s unrealistic at night to expect nice, bell-shaped histograms in the middle of the range. But if your histogram is totally clumped on the left, you have a problem.

I glanced at the histogram for the previous exposure, and lightened things up a bit, moving from f/13 to f/10. Had I known the scene would darken as much as it did (because of the clouds), I would have opened it up at least another full f-stop.

[Nikon D300, 12-24mm zoom lens at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms), 2,407 seconds (about 40 minutes) at f/10 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Star Circles, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Two thousand four hundred seconds, about forty minutes. Actually longer, maybe three thousand five hundred seconds, or close to an hour, when you add in-camera noise reduction.

I have mixed emotions when it comes to exposures that take this long. You don’t get many cracks at getting the exposure right. For one thing, each exposure drains a battery. Conditions change, and the night is only so long. Someone (or something like a car, boat, or plane) might shine a light in the direction of the camera. In the end, the LCD display is unreliable (it overcompensates for lousy exposures), so you can’t judge very well in the field (the exposure histogram gives better information).

So making these captures I feel every inch the heroic photographer in the tradition of the pioneers who made their subjects hold still for hours during an exposure (and then waited days for the wet plates to dry!). Of course, I also feel like a klutz when the exposure doesn’t come out, or the visual concept doesn’t hold up in the actual image.

On a more human element, I am measuring time as it passes. Sometimes I pace, sometimes I stand still. I try sitting or lying down, but the ground is too damp and cold. Each second can seem like eternity. There are thousands of seconds weighing me down.

I’m bundled against the wind and moisture in wool layers, poly piling, down, with a balaclava pulled down over my head. Is this water drop slow torture, or is it sublime as my city sensibility gradually clears, and I observe the night, forced to take the time to see things that are a cipher to most folk.

Other Star Trawler images: Big Dipper; Pole Star; The Long and Short; Star Trawler.

[Nikon D300, 12-24mm zoom lens at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms), 2,407 seconds (about 40 minutes) at f/13 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Big Dipper, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

While shooting the Star Trawler and Pole Star sequence, I noticed that the old, wrecked trawler Point Reyes could be shot facing due north so that Polaris would be centered within a circle of moving stars.

I decided to come back to the spot on a moonless night for some really long shots that would capture circular star trails around the stationary Polaris. Driving into the sunset past Samuel Taylor State Park I headed into a fog bank, and when I got to Inverness it was foggy, windy, and cold. I almost didn’t get out of the car. But I did, wandering down to the boat without my camera. As I looked up, I watched the sky clear.

Back at the car, I stripped and put on my woolen long underwear. It was going to be a long, cold vigil.

This was a warm-up test shot at three minutes (the 40 minute exposures came later). I like the way the Big Dipper is so clear and obvious in this photo.

For the curious, I supplemented the lighting on the boat with some discrete light painting with my head lamp. The trick, I find, is to keep the bursts of light short and constantly in motion.

[Nikon D300, 12-24mm zoom lens at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms), 180 seconds (3 minutes) at f/5.6 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Campsite #4, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I spent a night last week camping on Angel Island. Smack dab in the middle of San Francisco Bay, wild in the midst of civilization, I had a great time. You can only reach Angel Island by ferry, and after the last ferry left I had the place pretty much to myself. I climbed Mount Livermore, and then settled down at my camp.

Perched on the southwest corner of the island, I had drop-dead views of Alcatraz, downtown San Francisco, and the Golden Gate. The show started at sunset, and did not stop. More photos will follow.

I took this one a little after midnight. There was a huge old Eucalytus tree stump at my campsite. I exposed for the Golden Gate Bridge, and lit the stump (which was in deep shadows) during the exposure by “painting” with light, using my headlamp.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 18mm (27mm in 35mm terms), 60 seconds at f/5 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related stories: Alone in the City; Gerbode Valley.

Pole Star, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is the last of a sequence of twelve photos of the wrecked Point Reyes trawler near Inverness. I took these photos the other night over the course of a couple of hours. The sequence started with The Long and the Short, and included Star Trawler. Like Star Trawler, this last capture in the series is a 1,204 second (20 minute) exposure.

As I was taking this photo, I was interested in the reflection of the boat in the water. I’ll admit I was pretty bored with all the waiting around during the long exposures and the in-camera noise processing, so I augmented the reflection with a little discreet light painting on the hull with my headlamp.

I also angled my camera so that it was facing due north and the Pole Star. The Pole Star, also called Polaris or the North Star, is almost stationary in this photo while all the other stars trail around it. This is because the Pole Star lies nearly in a direct line with the axis of the Earth’s rotation “above” the North Pole.

It has been rudimentary night-time navigation for thousands of years in the nothern hemisphere to determine north using the Pole Star (and is still useful if you are lost in the wilderness at night without a GPS or compass).

To determine north, first find the Big Dipper. Next, locate the “cup” part of the dipper so you can draw a mental line extending from the star Merak and extending beyond the star Dubhe (you’ll find a diagram in the Wikipedia article). The extended line will point at the bright Pole Star (it’s about five times as far from Dubhe as Merak and Dubhe are apart). Draw a line from the Pole Star to the earth, and you’ve fairly accurately found north.

This explains why I was excited when I spotted the Big Dipper pointing to the Pole Star directly above the wreck of the Point Reyes. I was hoping to capture the stars whirling around the single still point of Polaris above the boat.

[Nikon D300, 12-24mm zoom lens at 13mm (19.5mm in 35mm terms), 1,204 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Star Trawler 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is my first, and shortest, exposure of the Point Reyes boat the other night. As I explained in my original story about the star trawler, I was surprised to find the apparently monchromatic moonlight producing such vibrant colors.

The longer exposure was intended to produce star trails, but I like the effect here too: of stars more the way we see them.

The pair of photos illustrates a spread of aperture-shutter speed combinations, both at essentially the same exposure value: from 1,204 seconds at f/22 at the long end to 30 seconds at f/3.5 at the short end. (”Long” and “short” refer to time.) Since depth of field is not an issue in these photos, the contrast is a good illustration of the differing way exposure time treats objects in motion (the stars).

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 18mm (27mm in 35mm terms), 30 seconds at f/3.5 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Star Trawler 1, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a 1,204 second (or about twenty minute) exposure of the wrecked fishing trawler Point Reyes. I’ve photographed this boat before, but never at night.

There was a bright moon in the sky, and as I walked across the mud flats behind the Inverness General Store, my fear was that all that moonlight would detract from the starlight. As I set up my tripod, polka music came faintly from the Czech restaurant in Inverness. Vladimir’s, it seems is still run by 78-year-old Vlad, and according to this review sometimes features live music from the old country, which must have been what I was hearing. Somehow, the music seemed to fit the slightly sad scene of the wrecked boat forever grounded on the mudbank.

As I began running test exposures, it became clear from my review in the LCD that my fears that moonlight would render colors monotonic were misplaced. It’s true that the stars were not as bright in the sky as they would have been on a moonless night. But the moonlight brightly lit the dark mass of the trawler (helped along in this exposure, I confess, with a little judicious light painting with my head lamp). The moonlight also created the reflections in the water in the foreground. If you look closely, you’ll even see reflected star trails.

And the astounding thing was that to my eye the world lit by moonlight was close to monochromatic, but the sensor picked up things with the vivid colors you see here.

For this long exposure, I stopped the lens down to f/22, with the idea of picking up as much star motion as I could.

[Nikon D300, 12-24mm zoom lens at 13mm (19.5mm in 35mm terms), 1,204 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Two things are special to me about wandering the night with my digital camera. The first is the way I experience night. The second is the way a digital sensor can reveal colors and shapes in spite of apparent darkness.

As a wanderer in the darkness, I enjoy more freedom of the hills than those who must rush back to trailheads, cars, and lit houses as dusk approaches. There are few humans out and about at night (although there are many animals to be seen and heard). Fellow human travelers in the darkness greet each other like the explorers they are: aliens in a vast territory as strange to most people as the depths of the ocean or the reaches of space. Alone in the darkness of night, the stars wheel and individual car lights make a big impression as in this twenty minute exposure of Zion Canyon.

View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

Some early experiments with digital photography at night taught me that sensors pick up light waves beyond the ranges of human perception. It still astounds me that these photos of Point Reyes were taken in almost complete darkness. Well after sunset, there’s radiation our eyes can’t see bouncing off water, cliffs, and sky. This makes the combination of night wandering and digital photography unbeatable.

While digital photography at night in the city doesn’t involve the heroic exposure extremes of nature photography at night, there still are unexpected and unusual rewards.

If you are interested in learning more about night photography, I invite you to join me for a weekend of photography fun with like-minded souls here in Berkeley May 2-4, 2008 under the auspices of Digital Stop. This is a rare opportunity to experience the passion, joy, and freedom of night photography under the guidance of an expert! Here’s the link for on-line course registration and the workshop description:

Night photography has always been an area for creative experimentation. With the advent of digital photography, and its expanded dynamic range and light sensitivity beyond the visible spectrum, Harold Davis, the creator of www.digitalnight.us, takes workshop participants into the digital night.

During an orientation session, techniques, equipment, and night safety issues are covered. Moving outdoors, workshop participants will create night-time captures. Regrouping the following day, digital post-processing of night captures in Photoshop will be thoroughly demystified. Work will be evaluated in the context of personal creative goals. A second night shoot gives participants the opportunity to put into practice the night skills they have learned. We will learn to make spectacular photographs of the San Francisco skyline at night, as well as quieter photos of the landscape of the night by starlight.

Night covers the globe half the time. Surprisingly to many, photographic opportunities with digital equipment are as exciting during night as the day. Awake to the freedom of the night! Bring your energy and creativity, and expect to have a great time. You’ll go home with great images and the skills to capture night photos while the rest of the world sleeps.

Related link: Digital Night by Harold Davis.

So It Begins, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The lunar eclipse a few nights ago was already beginning when I got to Inspiration Point. Later, as the eclipse got fuller, it would be an issue of finding gaps in the cloud coverage.

But to start with, the issue was to avoid overexposing the moon, surprisingly bright and still glowing with reflected sunlight, in a sky that wasn’t fully dark. Fortunately, I’ve had enough bad experience with washed out and overexposed moons to know to stop this one way down compared to the camera’s light reading.

[Nikon D300, 600mm in 35mm terms, 1/15 second at f/8 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Lunar Eclipse, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A full lunar eclipse was scheduled just after moon rise in the early evening in the Bay area. My hope, foiled by roiling cloud cover blowing in through the Golden Gate, was to photograph from Marin Headlands with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge as background.

Instead I headed east to Inspiration Point in Tilden Park in the coastal range. Parking the car, I hiked in a mile or so to a ridge with a great view of the show. As the evening got dark it grew cold, and the clouds covered the moon. Even so, I got in a shot or two and enjoyed the spectacle and solitude.

[Nikon D300, 600mm in 35mm terms, 1 second at f/5.6 and ISO 400, tripod mounted.]

Winter Moon and Cherry Leaves, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Christmas eve we had lots of family over, a turkey dinner, and the table groaned. Later, after almost everyone had gone home, and it was time to get the kids to bed, I saw the winter moon rising over the hills. I took a fancy to photographing the rising moon through the leaves of our decorative Japanese cherry tree. Satiated with food and with my mind on family I was almost going to pass on it. But every time I haven’t tried for a photo that took my fancy, I’ve regretted it.

I packed my kit and went outside with Julian while Phyllis got Nicky and Mathew to bed.

With Julian giving me advice, I started shooting the moon through the winter leaves of the decorative cherry tree (I planted it about the time Julian was born).

I boosted the ISO up to 3,200 for my first shots, focused at infinity for the moon, and hoped for the extreme low noise that I’ve been getting with my new D300. But the best image in the series turned out to be this, shot conventionally at ISO 100 and 15 seconds, and focused on the branch of the tree. Focusing closer at a wide-open aperture made the moon–which was going to blow out highlights completely if I retained any foreground detail–huge, abstract, and round.

Related story: Moon Roll.

[300mm in 35mm terms, 15 seconds at f/4.2 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

I’ll be leading a hands-on workshop on digital night photography from May 2-4, 2008 under the auspices of Digital Stop in Berkeley, California. Please consider joining me for a fun and exciting weekend.

View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

Course Description

Night photography has always been an area for creative experimentation. With the advent of digital photography, and its expanded dynamic range and light sensitivity beyond the visible spectrum, Harold Davis, the creator of www.digitalnight.us, takes workshop participants into the digital night.

During an orientation session, techniques, equipment, and night safety issues are covered. Moving outdoors, workshop participants will create night-time captures. Regrouping the following day, digital post-processing of night captures in Photoshop will be thoroughly demystified. Work will be evaluated in the context of personal creative goals. A second night shoot gives participants the opportunity to put into practice the night skills they have learned. We will learn to make spectacular photographs of the San Francisco skyline at night, as well as quieter photos of the landscape of the night by starlight.

Night covers the globe half the time. Surprisingly to many, photographic opportunities with digital equipment are as exciting during night as the day. Awake to the freedom of the night! Bring your energy and creativity, and expect to have a great time. You’ll go home with great images and the skills to capture night photos while the rest of the world sleeps.

More info
Register

Desert Night, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is the last photo I took during my all-night vigil in the desert. The photo looks generally southwest, up towards the crest of the Sandstone Ridge.

My last battery gave out after the thirty minute exposure had finished, but before the camera had finished processing it. My speculation is that the odd purple fringing at the corners was caused by this interuption.

[This photo: 18mm in 35mm terms, about thirty minutes at f/4 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]