Pipes, Tank, and Cyclone Fence Shadows. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white night photorgraph of pipes, a tank, and cyclone fence shadows falling across a brick wall at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This past weekend I had a chance to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an introduction to night photography at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California. The Nocturnes schedule events at this wonderful and rich location several times each year, and I have done night photography there many times in the past. Many of the photographers at this particular event were experimenting with “the dark side” for the first time, so I decided to go both to do a bit of my own shooting and to help Tim Baskerville answer questions from some of the first-timers.

This bit of industrial “stuff” is in a location I have shot many, many times. It is in an alley next to what is now the Mare Island Historic Museum, and it traditionally the first place that many MINSY night photographers start their evening of night photography. Since I’ve shot quite a few of the standard subjects at Mare Island, I had in mind a few slightly different subjects and different approaches in mind this time. One was to focus specifically on shadows as a compositional element and another was to look for some of the smaller details of the place in addition to shooting the very interesting larger structures that so often get my attention.

So, after shooting nearby structure with shadows angling across the alley, I thought that I’d see what I could do with this odd bit of old pipes and a tank against a brick wall, and illuminated by nearby sodium vapor lamps shining through a cyclone fence. I liked the shiny texture of the pipes and their shapes as they radiated from the central tank, along with the shapes of both the very dark and large shadows and the net of fainter shadows thrown over the whole scene by the fence.

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