Yellow Building With Dark Windows, Star Trails. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 26, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Night photography of an old yellow building with dark windows against a backdrop of dark sky with star trails, Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.
This is probably a fairly conventional image of Mare Island buildings in some ways and it includes the ever popular star trails! One aspect of doing night photography – especially when exposures are measured in minutes rather than seconds, much less fractions of seconds, and double-especially when you must wait for a second dark-frame exposure to complete – is that you have a lot of time to stand around and observe and think about what you see. A whole lot of time. Before I made this photograph, I had made one of a nearby wall with some interesting windows and a door and illuminated by some light that passed through some intervening stuff, producing interesting shadows. The alley where I was shooting was quite dark, necessitating fairly long exposures, so as I made that previous photograph I had perhaps 10-15 minutes of “standing around time,” during which I was able to observe my surroundings pretty closely.
Lately one subject that I’ve been experimenting with is the upper stories of buildings, shot from below and with sky beyond. Near where I was shooting and next to a nearby alley was this large (apparently) concrete building with dark windows, and its pointed prow against a backdrop of relatively dark sky. I noticed that this section of sky held more bright stars that some other areas and that if I lined things up just right I could position some to either side of the point at the corner of the building.
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Beautiful composition of building and sky. As you probably know by now, that is Orion, one of my favorite Winter constellations, skirting to the right of the prow of the building. Amazing star trails in such an urban environment.
Thanks, Richard. Yes, that is one of the (unfortunately few, I’m afraid) constellations that I can recognize and name – those three stars in a row are a striking sight. I think that the very clearn and very cold (for the SF Bay Area) night air helped a lot with the clarity of the stars on this evening. And even though Mare Island is a very “constructed” environment, at night it is also a very quite place with very little traffic and not too much light.