This light painting extravaganza took place during my night photography shoot on Mare Island sponsored by Renegade. The big impact of relatively small lights at night has to be seen to be believed. This was great fun, and a great group of shooters.

More Mare Island.

New Year’s Eve featured a blue moon rising early, but the layers of fog and clouds that swept over San Francisco Bay made a capture seem unlikely.

When the moon made a brief appearance through a rift in the clouds I was ready, with an exposure biased towards the moonlight. The composition is based on the idea of letting everything besides the moon and its light on the water go pitch black. And also on the aesthetic pleasures of grain, er, I mean noise.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 65mm, 1/30 of a second at f/5.0 and ISO 3200, hand held; yes, folks, you read that right, ISO 3,200. Look ma, no tripod.

Night Lights, a story about my night photography, is running on the Nikon USA website in the Insight & Techniques section of Learn & Explore.

By the strong light of a waxing gibbous moon I photographed the outer Marin Headlands coast, looking south towards the Point Bonita Lighthouse, the Golden Gate straits, and the lights of San Francisco’s outer sunset district.

The final image is a composite combined in Photoshop based on three exposures. All three exposures were taken with my Nikon D300 at 56mm using a tripod. The variations were 1 minute at ISO 200 for the darkest areas, 1 minute at ISO 100 for midtones, and 30 seconds at ISO 100 for highlights. I used the in-camera exposure histogram to judge the exposures because the display on the LCD of a RAW image captured in these conditions is inherently unreliable.

These two images were captured from the seventh floor balcony of the Hotel Jagua in Cienfeugos, Cuba.

Cienfeugos is a relatively prosperous city by Cuban standards, as you can see in the sunset view of the place. I created the image from five captures with shutter speeds ranging from 1/80 of a second (darkest) to 1/8 of a second (lightest). I combined the captures in Photoshop using layers and masking.

I didn’t use software specifically intended to create HDR imagery, but the hand combining I used here is an example of hand HDR. Contrary to what some people seem to think, you don’t need to use Photomatix or Photoshop’s Merge to HDR to create HDR imagery—and HDR can look relatively natural. See Tone Poem for a comparison of Hand HDR and Photomatix.

The night photo is of the Palacio del Valle, a rather tasteless neo-Moorish confection at the end of the Punto Gorda peninsula in Cienfeugos. The Palacio is now a restaurant and nightclub.

If you are wondering where the power for all the lights is coming from, look no further than the view of Cienfeugos (above). In the distance, a power generator is burning cheap Venezuelan crude and belching smoke into the sky.

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I shot this view of the Malecon in Havana, Cuba from the small bluff that the Hotel Nacional sits on. (More about the Hotel Nacional later.)

The two minute exposure gave the clouds a chance to spread out and show their colors in the moonlight. This exposure would have blown out the Malecon itself in the foreground of the photo, so I used a layer mask and a gradient to combine in a darker version shot at 20 seconds.

You can see a row of people living their life along the Malecon sea wall. But the long exposure has “flattened” them in some strange visual way—so even the people seem to be merely accessory to the landscape.

Night comes to El Malecon, the boulevard that runs along the ocean. Old Havana glimmers in the distance. Soft light and surf spray in the air soften decrepitude. Lovers meet, music plays. You’d never know this isn’t the good life.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 65mm, 30 seconds at f/11 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.

Painting with light is a great deal of fun. You can do it anywhere. A darkened room will work, as will the night itself. These two shots were taken at a recent night photo workshop I gave on Point Reyes.

Improvisation is the key. The lights along the fence above was created by a slow dance with two performers and two colored lights; the striped light coming down the stairs (below) was a flashing iPhone.

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The Point Reyes Lighthouse is one of my favorite night photography subjects. This was shot during a recent workshop I gave with Point Reyes Field Seminars. I’m lucky that each of my night photo workshops has been allowed down the steps to the lighthouse, although the weather hasn’t always been the greatest!

Here are a couple of my all time favorite Point Reyes Lighthouse images: Night at Point Reyes Lighthouse and Edge of Night.

Facing the beach I turned around. The night cliffs were lit by moonlight. Sometimes there’s a story behind one, if only one looks.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 18mm, 4 minutes at f/5.0 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.