Night Photography Archives

May 11, 2014

The Cafe Was Closin’…

I’m in Athens, Ohio, working on a couple of projects with Curator Jessica and getting ready to head up to Columbus Sunday to pick up Friend Anne, so the two of them can Road Warriorette back to Florida with me.

I hit town and promptly came down with a killer sore throat. I managed to make it through a 2-hour video interview, but by the next day my voice was reduced to a croak and my head felt like there was a basketball inside trying to get outside. I alternated between being completely stopped up and having to carry a bucket to capture the drips.

Saturday afternoon was spent wandering around a huge rural cemetery looking for a grave that would “tell the rest of the story” of one I did in 1970. The man and his wife weren’t were they were supposed to be, so I guess I’ll have to try again later.

A greasy burger called my name

I took a two-hour nap and woke up feeling both better and ravenous. Somewhere in Athens, Ohio, I knew there was a greasy hamburger calling my name. There was: I ended up at the Union Street Diner, and it was all I had hoped for.

On the way back to the motel, I stopped to shoot night photos of a number of small businesses, some of which had been in business when I worked here.

Only a few cars were left in the Dairy Queen parking lot, and the waitress was stacking chairs getting ready to clean up the day’s messes. I decided it was worth a U-turn.

While shooting this, John Prine’s song, Far From Me started playing in my head.

As the cafe was closing on a warm summer night
And Cathy was cleaning the spoons
The radio played the hit parade
And I hummed along with the tune

She asked me to change the station
Said, the song just drove her insane
But it weren’t just the music playing
It was me she was trying to blame

And the sky is black and still now
Up on the hill where the angels sing
Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle
Looks just like a diamond ring
But it’s far, far from me

Y0u can read all the lyrics here, or listen to John sing it here. You can click on the images to make them larger.

May 5, 2014

“Reality” Is Just a Level Adjustment

I’m pretty much a photo purist. I don’t set up photos and I try to manipulate the image only enough that the finished product matches what my eye and mind saw when I pushed the button. On one of my walks from the river at dusk, I saw the light reflecting off the BSNF train tracks between the floodwall and Water Street.

It’s pretty similar to a shot I took in 2009, but that didn’t stop me from shooting it again.

That’s pretty much what my eye recorded, except that my eye saw the reflections on the rails as more red.

So, is THIS real?

One of the first things I do when I open a frame in Photoshop is decide if it needs cropping. The second step is to adjust the levels of the highlights, shadows and midtones. The program has a feature so you can adjust it by a graph rather than with your eye. You just keep moving a slider until the highlights or shadows block up, then you look at the picture and see if you want to tweak it. Generally you do.

In this case, I blindly moved the highlight slider to what should have been the “optimal” point and let go of the button. As you can see, the photo is radically different: the red reflections are gone, the sky has turned a brighter blue and the mural on the floodwall has become more prominent.

Neither iteration of the photo captures exactly what I was looking for, but it goes to show how a few twitches of your finger on a mouse can serve up two radically different views of the same subject.

April 3, 2014

Shooting What You See

The rain was just slacking off when I got out of a meeting Wednesday night, so I decided to take a run downtown to see if there was any wet street art to be made. I saw something promising on Main Street, but couldn’t find a parking spot nearby. I decided to go down Water Street and make another pass at it.

When I got to the intersection with Independence, the stop sign glared back at me. Nothing unusual about that, it’s supposed to reflect light when your headlights hit it at night.

That’s when I saw the reflection of the street sign and the stop sign in the water on the wet street. Fortunately, nobody was behind me, so I put it in back-up and angled into a parking space.

I got out of the car and slogged through the water until I thought I had the right angle.

The picture was gone

I’ve talked before about how you have to shoot as soon as you see a picture: if you don’t the magic might leak out. I figured that’s what had happened here: that in the 30 seconds it took for me to get out of the car, grab the camera and find the angle, maybe enough water had drained from the street to lose the reflection.

That’s when it dawned on me: REFLECTION. What had changed was that my headights were no longer hitting the signs, hence, there was no light to be reflected.

I got back in the car and changed from angle parking to aiming my lights down the street. I didn’t want to block the street, so I was still well off to the side. It was close, but not what I saw the first time.

There are no cars out

That’s when I realized that this is CAPE. There ARE no cars out on a rainy Wednesday night. I positioned my car in the travel lane and fired away. NOW I was seeing what I had seen behind the wheel.

This was one of the situations where the photo probably would have been better if I had gone the HDR route, which takes multiple exposures, then combines them into one frame. There were several reasons why I didn’t do that:

So, why didn’t I use HDR?

I don’t use HDR enough to be comfortable to setting the camera in the dark.
It required me to drag my tripod out.
My tummy was growling.
It was still sprinkling. Those last three things violate my Retirement Contract where I don’t (A) Go hungry; (B) Get wet or (C) Lift heavy objects.

Other night weather photos

I’m a child of the night. I loved roaming the streets and alleys of towns after dark. After every cop in town had stopped my at least once, they tended to leave me alone.

Want to know why most car ads are shot with streets that have been sprayed with water? It makes them look cool. Here are a some of collections of night weather pictures.