Tag Archives: bright

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

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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: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Bird, Flooded Fields

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Bird, Flooded Fields
Bird, Flooded Fields

Bird, Flooded Fields. Central Valley, California. January 23, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A bird wades in a flooded Central Valley winter field in front of a receding line of power poles and some farm buildings on a levee.

This is (yet another!) photograph of the flooded fields along a country road near the Cosumnes River in California’s Central Valley. I was shooting almost directly into the sun through remaining fog and haze near the middle of a winter day. The building sits on a levee between the fields and the bird was kind enough to pose for me while I made the photograph.

Given one of the subjects subject that I’ve been discussing at the blog during the past few days, it seems reasonable to point out that this image involved significant work during the post-processing phase – what we used to refer to as “the darkroom,” but which we now refer to as “photoshop.” I used a variety of techniques to push this image towards what I had in mind – a very high key interpretation that I hope evokes the sensation of looking into a backlit hazy atmosphere that is so bright that you can barely look at it. (In fact, it was very much like this when I made the photograph – as you can see it required a 1/1000 second exposure at f/8 and ISO 100. That’s bright!) In general I brought the overall brightness up to nearly pure white in the lightest portions of the image, and I employed some other techniques to lower the amount of contrast in the sky yet keep the building, the poles, and the levee fairly dark. Although all of this was accomplished in the “digital darkroom,” all of the processes are equivalent to those that might have been applied by photographers working in the traditional darkroom.

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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: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Textures

Aspen Color – Wall of Leaves

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Aspen Color - Wall of Leaves
Aspen Color - Wall of Leaves

Aspen Color – Wall of Leaves. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. October 2, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A nearly solid wall of brilliant fall aspen leaf color in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

This is going to be the first in a short series of “frame filled with foliage” photographs that I’ll post. Although I think they work best as prints – and fairly large ones at that – I’d like to share these since they are something a bit different that I’ve been working on.

Sometimes I’m just so impressed by the sheer density and complexity of the foliage that I’m tempted to just point that camera at them and click. It might look like that is what is going on here, but I am also trying (remember, “trying!”) to find some sort of pattern and form in these very complex textures. This photograph was made in a small aspen grove that was essentially at the color peak – only a very small number of partly green leaves remained, yet most of the transformed leaves were still on the tree. If you have chased aspen color, you know how difficult it can be to find the leaves at just this point!

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.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Fall Color, Eastern Sierra Aspens

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Fall Color, Eastern Sierra Aspens
Fall Color, Eastern Sierra Aspens

Fall Color, Eastern Sierra Aspens. Sierra Nevada, California. October 3, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A grove of aspen trees along Bishop at the peak of their gaudy fall colors, Sierra Nevada, California.

On a week of brilliant fall color during an autumn when the color was exceptional in parts of the eastern Sierra, this little grove of aspens was almost absurdly colorful. I first saw them while driving away from a nearby shot – their fluorescent colors got my attention while I was looking in a completely different direction. The colors nearby were quite something, but they literally paled next to this grove. (I’ve heard trees like this referred to as Cheetos trees – and I think you can imagine why.)

Should you think that this color is simply something I’ve pumped up in post processing, take a look at the boulder in the lower part of the frame and see the tree trunks and the pale grasses at bottom right. The fact that I shot in over cast conditions, late in the day, and in a very light rain did intensify the colors a bit, but this is what they looked like.

These colors present some photographic challenges. The main one is that almost all of the light is in the red channel, and when shooting a digital camera it is easy to blow out (grossly overexpose) the red channel and not even realize it. I have found that with this subject it is critical to use the three-channel histogram display that shows the separate levels of red, green, and blue. The single luminosity histogram display averages the values of the three color channels, and if one is extremely hot (as is the red channel here) you can blow it out even if the histogram looks fine.

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.

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