A couple of weeks ago, Aline Smithson’s blog, Lenscratch profiled thirteen night images of mine.  Aline purposely chose more unusual images from the group I sent her.  I received emails about a few of them and thought I would discuss two here that were asked about.

Water Tanks

This image, shot in northern California, is a totally available light shot.  It was shot in 4×5 with a wide angle 90mm lens, with a lot of front rise to keep the water tanks from having the appearance of leaning back.  The subtlety of the differently colored street lamps reflecting off the bottom of the tanks gives life to this image.  It is a 30 minute exposure because it was shot on a very dark alley.  The line on the left is a star trail.

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Ship’s Prow

This is an image of a mega-yacht in dry dock in the San Francisco Bay Area.  There is a touch of sunset light at the horizon.  As in the other image, this 4×5 view also has a lot of front rise to keep the appearance of the monumentality of the size of of the vessel.  Otherwise, it would have appeared smaller.  The correct camera placement was critical in this image to keep everything lined up.  Also, the main artificial lights in the dry dock are mercury vapor, so I used a magenta filter to correct for the predominately green light.  This rendered the ship a ‘neutral’ color.  The orange light on the highly polished hull on the right are reflections of sodium vapor lamps in the yard   This reflected light is what caught my eye while I was walking the yard.  I knew it would give interest to otherwise very dark blue ship.  This image has been in several shows, and was shown at 30×40 inches.

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These two images show the subtlety of reflected light at night.  Without them, these images would been much weaker.