Nimitz Avenue Buildings and Tracks. Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California. February 6, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Night photography of Nimitz Avenue buildings and railroad tracks at the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.
This row of old shipyard buildings is along Nimitz Avenue and directly faces the area where ships were apparently worked on. In the distance one of the large overhead structures used to move heavy ship components to the water is visible, and the railroad tracks run up the street in front of the buildings. A combination of high clouds and lower fog is blurred by the nearly five minute exposure time of this image.
This photograph illustrates some of the technical issues that come up when doing this sort of night photography and, in particular, when photographing at Mare Island at night. I love to shoot subjects illuminated by the wildly variable artificial lighting found here, which can include just about every kind of light imaginable: sodium vapor lights, tungsten lights, fluorescent lighting, light bleeding from the town of Vallejo across the water, the light of the moon (though not on this occasion). Here a large part of the lighting is very “hot” yellow/red toned artificial light, making it hard to control the red channel on my DSLR and still get enough light in the other channels. In addition we have the contrast between the very light colored paint on the close building (which is lit by closer lights) and the much darker and less reflective brick surfaces beyond. In front of that runs the road, which is crossed by some deep shadows that I don’t want to end up completely black. And overhead is the beautifully diffused bit of clouds and some star light, but if color adjustments are made to the foreground buildings the sky can end up looking quite strange. Although it isn’t apparent in the shot, a great deal of care is required to to get the composition you want and not place very bright light sources directly in the frame, and this adds a difficult element to creating a composition that you don’t usually deal with in the day time. (I try to keep them out of the frame, but I also sometimes place the camera so that a beam or pole or the edge of a building blocks the direct lights.) Finally, in this case, I had to work close to the buildings with a bit of a wide angle lens, introducing some obvious perspective effects, some of which I’ve modified a bit in post.
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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