Category Archives: Photographs: Structures and Objects

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

Shack with Red and Green Interior Lights

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Shack with Red and Green Interior Lights
Shack with Red and Green Interior Lights

Shack with Red and Green Interior Lights. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 26, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small shack with interior lit by red and green lights at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California.

At last weekend’s night photography shoot with The Nocturnes at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard I wandered a bit further afield than I have on some previous visits, eventually ending up in an area where I have only photographed once before when I unsuccessfully shot a couple of large barn-like buildings. (I think I have a shot of these buildings from this trip that I like, and I’ll post it later on.)

While spending nearly a half hour photographing a light post against the backdrop of a very dark brick building (which amounted to two photographs, given the long exposure times and the follow-up “dark frame exposures) I kept thinking I saw a faint red glow inside a small nearby building. At first I thought that one of my fellow night photographers might be doing some light painting, but the light seemed awfully dim. Eventually I noticed that it was also quite constant – and light painting virtually always involves moving the hand held light source around in order to get a smooth lighting effect. Once I finished shooting the light pole (unsuccessfully, it turns out) I decided I would go over and see what was creating this light.

The buildings appears to be a small “guard shack” or similar, a very old and very dilapidated one room structure. Inside, as best as I could tell, there is a small table, a few chairs, a digital clock of some sort with green letters, and some kind of very dim red light. Intrigued, I decided to see if I could photograph it. One technical problem was going to be the very large difference in lighting between the bright light on the clock and the extremely dim exterior, made worse by the dark color of the building. I figured that I could probably put enough extra light onto the building’s exterior using a very small key chain LED light than I happened to have with me, and that is the major source of light on the front of the building and on the yellow foreground curve – I simply walked around on both sides of the building and moved the small light over its surface.

In the end, I think this is another example of night photography as a source of a certain kind of “fantastic” lighting. The actual scene was very, very dim, and the the intensity of the colors here is almost entirely the result of the very long exposure and a bit of improvised lighting on the yellow curb behind the fence – a photograph of something that cannot be seen with our own eyes.

More Night Photography

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

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Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light
Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light

Brick Wall with Windows and Doors, Artificial Light. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 26, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A brick wall with windows and a door is illuminated by garish yellow artificial lighting at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

During the final weekend of February I was able to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an “alumni” shoot at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at Vallejo, California. I photograph at this location a few times every year – most often with The Nocturnes – and each time I go I find something new or else find a new way to photograph something familiar.

This wall is in a little side alley off or one of the main roads through the facility. Although it certainly doesn’t look like it in this photograph, this is a fairly dark area of the island where rows of large factory buildings (mostly abandoned) are lit, for the most part, by a few security lights. Standing there next to me as I made the photograph, this is not what you would have seen. At best, I could make out the shapes and arrangement of the windows and door, recognize that the wall was constructed of bricks, and notice that the light from nearby yellowish artificial lights was diffused and broken up by shining through intervening fences and other stuff.

But, for me at least, one of the goals of night photography is to see what cannot be seen with our own eyes. The whole idea of a “realism” in night photography seems almost crazy to me, at least when shooting such dark subjects as this one. “Reality” is an incredibly dark and dim and barely visible wall. What is more interesting to me is what the camera can see in the near dark. Here it reveals the intense yellow/orange color of the artificial lighting and the uneven patterns of light and shadow.

(It also occurred to me as I worked on this photograph that while I generally am somewhat conservative with color and saturation and all the rest in my photography of natural landscapes… the wild, garish, and intense color and light of this night photography may represent an opposite pole for me.)

More Night Photography

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky

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Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky
Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky

Yellow Building with Weathered Windows, Night Sky. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Weathered windows below the eaves of a dilapidated yellow building at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard with star trails in the night sky.

This is another building that I have photographed a number of times when I’ve visited the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard to do night photography. Typically I have focused on the lower walls of the building, which are interesting due to the presence of garish yellow sodium vapor lighting, the interesting texture of corrugated metal walls with peeling paint, dilapidated and broken doors and windows, and the odd presence of a UFO-shaped shadow from a lamp hanging on the exterior. (A recent photo I posted featured that oddity.)

Here I wanted to shoot something a bit less complex and graphically simple – so I aimed the camera almost straight up from a position right in front of the building. Though they are difficult to see in this small jpg, the sky is filled with faint star trails from the two-minute exposure, and I like the way its inky blue-black color contrasts with the very warm colors of the yellow walls that are lit by sodium vapor light coming from multiple directions. The terribly weathered window frame, the bit of conduit attached to the wall, and the broken window panes break up the wall.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Turnstile Shadows

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Turnstile Shadows
Turnstile Shadows

Turnstile Shadows. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Shadows cast by sodium vapor lamps shining on old turnstiles at Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This old row of abandoned turnstiles stands at the entrance to an alley through which we almost always walk as we begin shooting in the core area of the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California. It seems odd to see the structure here since now one can just walk around them, but I suspect that this area must have been somewhat secure at times since military ships were built here.

This isn’t an easy subject to photograph. Several of us were talking about how we have struggled to find a composition built around the turnstiles. I have one other photograph that I made a few years ago that I think works pretty well. In that one I aimed a bit higher and let the metal structure pretty much fill the frame, and I also ended up making it a black and white image. (It was used as a cover for a book at one point.) But on this evening a few of us were staring at the turnstiles again and remarking that there must be more photographs in there… somewhere… but that we are still trying to find them.

I thought it might be interesting to make the long and complex patterns of the shadows fill most of the frame, so I moved back just a little and pointed the camera down so that just a portion of the turnstile structure appears at the top of the frame. This also helps with a couple of technical challenges: the bright lights beyond the structure create a tremendously large dynamic range in the scene, and it can be difficult to keep some distracting background elements (like a stop sign!) out of the image. The garish yellow/orange light is from a large sodium vapor lamp that sits above the intersection on the road in the background. That coloration is part of what made me choose to make the previous photograph of this subject black and white, but on this night I decided to go with the color.

The final image is a blend of two exposures. The shorter one was selected to avoid blowing out the brightest areas in the upper part of the frame, and the longer one let me keep a bit more detail in the shadowed asphalt foreground.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.