Tag Archives: mare

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

Shipbuilding Yard Towers, Night

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Shipbuilding Yard Towers, Night

Shipbuilding Yard Towers, Night. Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California. August 31, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

High fog across the night sky above towers at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to do night photography at the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California on a number of occasions over the past few years – largely because I discovered The Nocturnes, the SF Bay Area night photography group run by Tim Baskerville. (If you are looking for night photography events, workshops, and general information – you would do well to visit their web site.) The Nocturnes photograph regularly at Mare Island (also known as “MINSY”) and I got my first, ahem, exposure to night photography via one of their events.

This visit, on the final night of August, was the first time I’ve shot there when it wasn’t an event sponsored by The Nocturnes, and it seemed a bit odd to be the person most experienced at shooting here. This event was more or less organized by SF Bay Area photographer Ivan Makarov who contacted me ahead of time for some information about shooting at MINSY and invited me to join his group if I could. I could, so I did.

After shooting there a half dozen times or so, it starts to seem a bit too easy to keep shooting the same Mare Island icons in the same way, so this time I decided to try to shoot a few things that I had not shot before and to shoot some of the familiar subjects in somewhat different ways. One decision I made was to – for the most part – avoid the usual super-wide-angle shots that seem so obvious in this environment. I started out using a 70-200mm zoom instead and later moved to shooting with normal to slightly long primes. (I did fall back on the UWA approach for a few shots – heck, if it works I’m going to do it!) Another factor was that we did not have the totally clear full-moon skies that I’m more familiar with from previous MINSY shoots. We had a softer but earlier 3/4 moon, and at times there was quite dense high fog. The fog obviously obscures the sky and reduces/eliminates the star trail photographs, but it also picks up and then spreads a wonderful diffuse light from the many natural and artificial light sources found at MINSY.

The photograph shown here was made with the long zoom and includes nearly complete fog coverage of the sky. The lighting is a crazy combination of light from nearby Vallejo reflected in the clouds, garish sodium vapor lighting coming from beyond the scaffolding, and some “natural” light from the moon on the front of the metal building. (One of the things I enjoy about night photography in a location like this is that with so many wildly different light sources there is no correct color balance – so I get to pick!

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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Commentary

Photographs in the queue

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I know that some may wonder what sort of life I live that lets me (forces me to?) go online every morning, 365 days per year, and post a new daily photograph at 4:00 a.m. Pacific.

While I do post new photographs here at a rate of one per day – which does mean that I create new photographs at a fairly steady rate throughout the year – I don’t really get up at 4:00 a.m. every day to post the next one. Fortunately my web site has a queue feature – but you knew that already, right? (Sorry if I am disappointing anyone. :-)

Sometimes when things get busy I may actually find myself shooting and and then post-processing in the evening a photo that will appear on the site the next day. Yes, there have been a few occasions when I did not actually know what photograph would be posted 24 hours later! But more often I have at perhaps a week’s worth of photographs already in the queue and scheduled for automatic publication.

I’m thinking of this right now because it is a very good feeling to know that there are enough photographs in the queue right now to carry me all the way through the month of September! That’s right, while I’m out shooting the autumn aspens of eastern California nearly a month from now the photos that I posted today will be appearing here. (Between how and then you’ll see more work from the Sierra, additional photographs from San Francisco, and a series of night photography images shot at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard at the end of August.)