Tag Archives: nocturnal

Photographs: Night, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Urban/Street

Yellow Trestle and Night Sky

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Yellow Trestle and Night Sky
Yellow Trestle and Night Sky

Yellow Trestle and Night Sky. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Yellow trestle and night sky above historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California.

This trestle is one half of a pair of the structures that were apparently used for moving large parts of ships, perhaps including engines, from nearby work areas to the waterfront where ships were under construction at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard. This area is no long in use (with the possible exception of some ship dismantling work) and the tall structures that tower over the area are gradually rusting and weathering.

The gaudy light comes from a combination of the yellow paint on the steel structures and the intensely colored sodium vapor lamps used to light the area. The glow in the sky comes from the town of Vallejo, just across the water from Mare Island. For this photograph I put the camera as I high as I could on the tripod so as to shoot over the top of a rather tall fence. (Yet another use for live view – I was able to compose and focus the image even though the camera was perhaps a foot above me.) I aimed the camera up to try to exclude a lot of the buildings and other structures that are found below these towers, since I wanted the simply diagonal of the trestle to be largely unobstructed. The star trails in the sky are the result of three minute exposure.

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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: 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.

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

Pipes, Tank, and Cyclone Fence Shadows

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Pipes, Tank, and Cyclone Fence Shadows
Pipes, Tank, and Cyclone Fence Shadows

Pipes, Tank, and Cyclone Fence Shadows. Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, California. February 12, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white night photorgraph of pipes, a tank, and cyclone fence shadows falling across a brick wall at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard.

This past weekend I had a chance to join my friends from The Nocturnes for an introduction to night photography at the historic Mare Island Naval Ship Yard near Vallejo, California. The Nocturnes schedule events at this wonderful and rich location several times each year, and I have done night photography there many times in the past. Many of the photographers at this particular event were experimenting with “the dark side” for the first time, so I decided to go both to do a bit of my own shooting and to help Tim Baskerville answer questions from some of the first-timers.

This bit of industrial “stuff” is in a location I have shot many, many times. It is in an alley next to what is now the Mare Island Historic Museum, and it traditionally the first place that many MINSY night photographers start their evening of night photography. Since I’ve shot quite a few of the standard subjects at Mare Island, I had in mind a few slightly different subjects and different approaches in mind this time. One was to focus specifically on shadows as a compositional element and another was to look for some of the smaller details of the place in addition to shooting the very interesting larger structures that so often get my attention.

So, after shooting nearby structure with shadows angling across the alley, I thought that I’d see what I could do with this odd bit of old pipes and a tank against a brick wall, and illuminated by nearby sodium vapor lamps shining through a cyclone fence. I liked the shiny texture of the pipes and their shapes as they radiated from the central tank, along with the shapes of both the very dark and large shadows and the net of fainter shadows thrown over the whole scene by the fence.

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.