Compared to most of my night photography, especially the work from Mare Island, I think this photograph has more of a noir quality. I made it in extremely dark conditions at the bottom of a dark stairway next to a dark building in a dark corner of the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard using only moonlight. Oh, did I mention that it was very dark? :-)

Making this a bit more of a technical challenge, in order to get the composition I had in mind (more or less, since it was impossible to really see the scene fully) I needed to shoot from a position very close to the bottom of the stairway and close to the window at lower right. Since I didn’t want to lose sharpness on the far section of the wall that is lit by moonlight I had to use a small aperture of f/16. But in order to maintain image quality I didn’t want to raise the ISO too far. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place! So the exposure ended up being very close to eleven minutes long, and even this was barely long enough. (And, using the camera’s long-exposure noise reduction, this meant waiting around for well over 20 minutes to expose the shot and then do the follow-up dark frame exposure. For obvious reasons, I only made one exposure of this subject!)

This was a challenging photograph to print! It really needs to go all the way to black in portions of the lower left, but I need to retain at least a small amount of near-black detail – and it takes a bit of work to get the right color/detail in the shadow at the upper right.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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