Night photography of an old moonlit building with windows and metal stairs at the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.
Late in the evening of this visit to Mare Island with The Nocturnes I decided on one last little project – to wander off from the places where I most often shoot around the “historic core” of the facility and find a few out of the way and more isolated subjects. As I walked down one street I saw a driveway leading back into an area between a bunch of old buildings so I decided to check it out. After photographing a much larger building covered with external pipes (photo still in progress) I turned around and saw the moonlight falling across the worn paneling, windows, stairway, and sharp angles of this wooden building.
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.
Night photography of a moonlit stairway, wall, and window at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.
Compared to most of my night photography, especially the work from Mare Island, this photograph has, I think, more of a noir quality. This photograph was made 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 shot of this subject!)
This is going to be a challenging photograph to print! I think that it really needs to go all the way to black in portions of the lower left, but I’ll need to keep at least a small amount of near-black detail – and I’ll have to do a bit of work to figure out how to best print to get the right color/detail in the shadow at the upper right.
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.
Night panoramic photograph of the powerplant building and other structures along Railroad Avenue at the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.
This is a bit of a first for me – a night photography stitched panorama. This image is composed of two separate exposures which were aligned and “stitched” into a single image in post. (As such, it could be a very large print!) Shooting from an elevated position, I shot almost directly north (as you can tell from the star trails in the larger version). The view looks up Railroad Avenue past the iconic power plant building with its smokestack that is visible from all over Mare Island.
I’m usually a bit casual about exposure time with long exposure night photographs. It isn’t that I don’t care – it is just that one has a ton of leeway when it comes to the very long exposures I typically use. For example, on a 3 minute exposure you would have to be off by three minutes to overexpose by one stop! So rather than use a stopwatch or an automatic timer I just count to myself. I’m usually will within a 10% error, and that is good enough. However, when stitching “good enough” often isn’t. The separate component frames really need to be quite similar, so in this case I resorted to using my watch to get relatively accurate 90 second exposures.
Another interesting factor in night photography is illustrated in this photo, namely the wildly varied colors of the light sources we deal with. There are three dominant sources in this image. The overall illumination comes from the full moon, which is quite similar to day light in terms of white balance. On the near wall of the brick power plant there is very “hot” and saturated yellow/red tinted light, probably from sodium vapor lamps. Near the left end of the image is an old wooden building that is illuminated by very green light, which I believe comes from mercury vapor lamps. I often chuckle a bit when people speak of “white balancing” the color in a scene like this. If you pick one source for your white balance you’ll throw the others even more out of line. My philosophy is usually to just go with what looks right!
Finally, the idea of making the stitched panorama came from the recently started Panocturnists web site, begun by people connected with The Nocturnes, the San Francisco Bay Area night photography group. I was intrigued by the idea of creating panoramic night photography, and I’ve done a few images along these lines on my two most recent visits to Mare Island.
Colorful wall and reflective windows of a Mission District school building, San Francisco, California.
This is, obviously, a study of some interesting geometry I saw while wandering about in the Mission District. (These patterns of window and wall reminded me of some photographs I made at the Seattle Sculpture Park a couple of years ago.) The geometrical rectangular shapes of the windows and sections of green wall interest me, but what I was really looking at was the collection of surprisingly different “frame” in each of the windows. They range from the almost intact view of the old building in the larger section in the upper left quadrant to the distorted and quite abstract shape in its counterpart in the upper right quarter.
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.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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