Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building 631, Mare Island

6 Comments
Building 631, Mare Island
Building 631, Mare Island

Building 631, Mare Island. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, Vallejo, California. February 6, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Building 631, with badly peeling paint and illuminated by garish artificial lighting, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, Vallejo, California.

For some reason I often find myself down around the old power plant and in the alley next to Building 631 near the end of my nighttime shoots at Mare Island. The railroad tracks curve through this alley – though they aren’t particularly visible in this photograph – and the bizarre and garish light and grossly peeling paint on this wall seem different from many of the other subjects around here.

One of the fun things about this sort of night photography is that “white balance” is more or less impossible! This scene includes light sources ranging from some kind of bizarre blue-green lighting that I can’t identify (fluorescent?) to sodium vapor to tungsten to sky lit by the glow from Vallejo, across the bay from the island. When it comes to the right color balance… pick one! Or several! Or make one up! In the end, no matter what you choose it won’t really “look like” what you saw in the dead of night – but for me that isn’t really the object. Long-exposure night photography lets us reveal things that we cannot see with our own eyes and present them in ways that are imaginative and different from our usual reality.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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keywords: mare, island, naval, ship, yard, historic, vallejo, california, usa, nocturnes, night, photography, structures, building, 631, peeling, paint, wall, door, light, lamp, garish, artificial, window, road, track, sky, plants, old, abandoned, industrial, north america, conduit, boarded up, downspout, no parking, wire, perspective, convergence, stock

6 thoughts on “Building 631, Mare Island”

  1. Rajan, don’t know if you’ll make it back to read this or not, but it occurred to me today that the next photo in the series does a nice job of illustrating some of the thoughts I shared above. Even more than the “green building” photograph, this other one shows the effect of multiple varied light sources. The image is balanced largely for the illumination that is seen on the largest portion of the foreground and background buildings. However, that light doesn’t strike the left side of the front building due to a shadow created by another structure (it may have been the “green building” now that I think about it…) and the shadow is filled by the green light. And above and beyond the structures we have a bit of night sky illuminated by urban lights beneath it. Complicated! :-)

    Here’s a copy…

    photograph of building 417 at Mare Island

    Dan

    Reply

  3. Hi Rajan:

    No, on at least two counts it would not accomplish that goal in this scene. A key thing to think about is embodied in your last sentence: … if ExpoDisc would enable a more accurate rendition of what the eye saw. I’m afraid that in this case it would not help with either of those highlighted goals:

    • It would create a less accurate rendition of the actual colors in the scene. What a device like ExpoDisc tries to do is detect the overall color of the ambient light and then balance that to white. But here the overall light is not white and trying to make it so would present an inaccurate version of the color present in the scene. (There is one type of situation in which this could be useful. If I wanted to take a picture of someone’s face in this light and wanted the face to not be green, “adjusting away” the green cast could be a Good Thing.)
    • The “what the eye saw” question is perhaps the most interesting and complex one, and it is doubly so in night photography. First, the eye saw the rather green tones of the scene, so to the extent that color balancing would move the image away from that “imbalanced color” it would be less like what the eye saw. (In other words, we don’t want it to be white balanced – any more then we want to snow to be gray when we meter.) Second, in the very dark surroundings in which the photo was made, the relationship between what the eye sees and what the camera sees is even more tenuous that in daylight. When you come right down to it, the eye doesn’t seem much in this very dim light. Again, one of the possible reasons for doing night photography is to “make the invisible visible.” Much of night photography essentially denies the objective reality of the night – example abound, but the inclusion of star trails is one obvious one.

    Take care,

    Dan

    Reply

  4. Dan,

    I wasn’t disputing your interpretation of the scene – which, by the way, I quite like; there is a surreal quality about it – or the fact that he wonderful thing about night photography is the creative license on offer. I was wondering aloud if ExpoDisc would enable a more accurate rendition of what the eye saw.

    Reply

  5. Yes. And no.

    By using ExpoDisc (or a gray card or by using the gray eyedropper on an “average” layer in photoshop) we could attempt to get the overall color balance of the scene to be something it wasn’t, namely balanced. The scene really is an odd color.

    Tools that attempt to set an automatic white balance (or gray balance) are making certain guesses about the color in the overall scene. These sort of work if the colors in the scene are, on average, not too far from “balanced.” But when the colors are skewed in some odd direction – as they most certainly were here – these processes try to essentially neutralize the color imbalance that was actually present in the scene and the subject of the photograph. (This is a bit analogous to the well-known issues with, for example, metering snow. The meter will attempt to turn a very white scene into a neutral gray scene – which is certainly not what you want.)

    So, several things “complexify” the issue here:

    • The light in the scene is not “white balanced,” and a photo that balances it will look very different from what the eye saw in the scene.
    • In many similar night scenes (often even more so than in this one) there are so many wildly varying lighting sources that there is no one correct balance. For example, some of the scenes at Mare Island can have as many as three of four distinctly different light sources: full moon (essentially daylight balance), sodium vapor lamps (very “hot” colors), fluorescent bulbs (blue or greenish), and tungsten lamps (yellow/red).
    • In the end, these scenes are often extremely dim – often so dim that they cannot really be fully seen by the eyes. Part of what night photography can do is “make the invisible visible” by gathering enough light to create an image that is much brighter than the reality. Once you realize that “realistic” is not a relevant concept for this kind of subject – which “realistically” you can’t even see! – it becomes possible to be a lot freer about what you do with colors.

    Dan

    Reply

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