Night Photography Blog by Tom Paiva

Last week I went to the Palm Springs Photo Festival and drove the 40 miles out to the Salton Sea to do some scouting.  It had been years since I photographed along its shores and was curious what was left after all the years of the corrosive water, desert heat, strong winds, vandalism and general decay.

The Salton Sea is a flyway for almost 400 species of migrating birds that was created in 1905 by when the Colorado River jumped it banks and flooded the desert floor.  It is the largest lake in California whose surface is 226 feet below sea level and is about 150 miles from LA.  To read more, try this link on the Salton Sea.  There is also a great 6 minute video that talks about the area that is worth watching called The Accidental Sea.

We decided to rendezvous with my Long Beach City College class to explore for a Location Photography class, where we did some portraiture, landscapes and of course, night photography.  Since this blog is about twilight/night work, I will show some images I shot on the scouting evenings.  The weather was in the mid 80s and sunny, making it a pleasure to be out in the desert, especially at night.

I took many scouting shots of the different areas and towns along the lake with a point and shoot camera.  The North Shore area interested me most, so I decided to be there for twilight and stay to shoot at night.

There are both digital and large format 4×5 views and will show a few of each.

There was an abandoned group of stores, including the ones above, a video store and gas station.  This twilight 4×5 shot is of what is the best preserved of what is left of the stores.  There was no power–no lights–in this area, which is an unusual situation for an urban guy like me.

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Yes, you, too, can buy a lot here for $6950, but I bet there are built homes for not much more.  It seemed like half of all the homes and businesses around the lake for for sale.

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The famed architect Albert Frey designed Salton Sea Yacht Club building which had been abandoned for decades and I had not seen it in about 5 years.  It was in terrible shape, stripped and wrecked by vandals.  Since then, with some federal stimulus money, they restored the building to its former mid-century glory and have turned it into a museum and visitors center.  The above area is a picnic area where the former swimming pool was.  Positioning the 4×5 camera to obscure the lights from flare was a challenge.  The mixed lights with the parking/picnic area lights and blue glow of twilight are pleasing complementary colors.

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The side gate to the grounds of the Yacht Club was left unlocked, so I slipped in and did this twilight shot.  I am facing west here to capture the last of the sunset glow.  The mixed light of the warm toned tungsten lights on the palm trees mixed with the cool green mercury vapor lamps is highlighted in this 4×5 view.  The original transparency actually has more vivid colors than what appears here.

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The following images were shot with my digital SLR camera.  I was scouting and wanted to see the types of light that was available.

Here you can see the restored Yacht Club, one of the few things that was well lit in the area.  This is a combination of two images combined with layer masking.  One image for the top half and another for the bottom half.

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I drove towards the Yacht Club and shot this reverse angle.  It is illuminated by the Yacht Club itself.  This is a 2 minute exposure and shows a lone semi-truck that went by on highway 111.

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Careful observation of light and what it does is key to interesting night photography.  Here I noticed the parking light fixture casting its own shadow from the pole.  The warmed toned ground lamp fixture in the shadow adds another dimension.  The white marks near the main light are moths darting about.

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The lights from the Yacht Club spilled onto the old pilings in the marina.  A common technique night photographers use is to boost the ISO of the camera to get a quick shot to check for focus, exposure and composition.  This shot is one second at ISO 6400.  Note the three California White Pelicans on the water.  After checking the histogram, I felt this exposure was a bit dark, too.

I then switched to ISO 100 and did this 4 minute exposure (increasing the exposure a half stop at the same time):

It might be difficult to tell that the ISO 6400 image in these low res files that are too noisy and grainy for an image like this.  The ISO 100 image can make smooth, creamy toned large prints.  Note the white blurs on the water.  This is caused by the pelicans moving about on the water.  The sleeping birds on the pilings barely moved in the 4 minutes.  Note, too that you can now see some detail in the sky because of the increase in exposure.  Typically, I erase these test images as I shoot, but thought it would be a good learning tool to share one.

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This is an abandoned gas station next to the other closed stores on the north shore.  It is lit from a highway lamp a few hundred yards away and the almost full moon.  It is an 8 minute exposure at f8.

I then did an alternative view with a student’s ultra fast 50mm f1.2 lens, shot wide open:

It might be difficult to tell with this low res file, but the only thing in focus in this image is the “Tire Repair 24 Hr.” sign.  Note the fuzzy stars in this 30 second f1.2 (!) night exposure.  Interesting effect, indeed.

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I took the slow way back to Palm Springs on old highway 111 to see some of the industrial and agricultural businesses and saw this commercial fuel depot in Indio:

What is interesting is the wild mix of color.  The fuel pumps are lit by a sodium vapor street lamp causing the foreground red glow.  There are some unusual industrial lamps on the tanks.

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It was the tanks themselves with their shadows and unusual lighting that was the shot.  There was an open gate into the facility, and as I began to stroll in, I was quickly accosted.  The man on duty was just locking up to go home.  I figured if I was there a half hour earlier, I might have been able to get in.  Next time…  Interesting to note that Indio is 62 1/2 feet below sea level.

One of the hottest stories here in Los Angeles lately has been the moving of a 340 ton granite boulder from a quarry in Riverside to the Mid-Wilshire Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  This boulder will become part of a new exhibit called Levitated Mass.  Here is a diagram of what it will look like when it opens in late summer from a flier they were passing out along the streets.

The Rock has been traveling at night on a 105 mile circuitous route through LA and on one night last week my neighbor Norm and I drove to meet the caravan in Lakewood.  It was fascinating to watch this 200 foot long crane with 176 wheels pulled by a 6-wheel-drive truck and pushed from behind by two more big rig trucks.

There has been a lot of controversy about this art project.  Some say it is a financial folly (the $10 million project was paid for by private donations) others say the money could have been used better elsewhere (hundreds of workers have been employed just to move the rock and install it.)  Whether you like it or not, the best part about it all is that people are talking about art–even before it has been installed.  And to me, that’s a good thing.

Here is a shot that shows the scale of the 21 foot high rock.

Of course I shot many stills, but decided to do some time-lapse clips of the rig negotiating a major intersection.  The exposures are about a second apart.

The Rock arrived at LACMA early last Saturday morning–intact and safe.

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Also last week I went to the Getty Museum to see the Pacific Standard Time show, but really enjoyed the Lyonel Feininger exhibit.  I remember from my art school days that he was a master painter and photographer in the Bauhaus era in Germany, and famously had 22 images in Hitler’s ‘Degenerate Art’ show.  What I did not know was that he passionately ventured into night photography back in the 1920s.  He used a 4.5 x 6cm glass plate camera which was unusual, even in those days and he started in his late 50s to boot.  One of the interesting effects the glass plate causes is the haloing around points of light, like the one below.

  This phenomenon is caused by the double refraction of light on the two surfaces of the glass.

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As you can see here, we was exploring the light spilling from the interior of the building and the shadows from a street lamp from the left.  Feninger was a friend, neighbor and contemporary of László Moholy-Nagy and this is the light coming from his studio next door.

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He also did some great train shots such as this rail yard in Dessau, Germany, 1928.  The contrast of the black locomotives and deep shadows with the snow makes for a dramatically graphic image.  His notes say that it was -20C (-4F) when he made this shot, and you can feel it in this image.

Unfortunately, this show came down earlier this week.  I think many a night shooter should revisit some of these early masters.  I’m glad I bought the catalog.

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For those of you who are active “night photographers”, there is a juried show show called Night Light, associated with Darkroom Gallery in Vermont that is taking submissions until March 21.  Here is the link to the submissions page:  http://www.darkroomgallery.com/ex27

In 2010 I was the juror for their night photography show and contest.  There were some very creative images submitted last time.  Good luck!

Earlier this month, I was able to continue my shooting on the Bay Bridge reconstruction project, this time working on the bridge deck area during the process of pulling the suspension cables.  This is a potentially dangerous operation, but things were going smoothly that afternoon and evening.

This late afternoon shot shows the bundles of cable (each strand is about the size of a pencil) that are in bundles of 134 strands.  The sun came out for a couple of minutes at the end of the day that shows the sunlight reflecting off the cables.

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Here we see one of the saddles that the cable will wrap around, with the SAS tower in the background.  The cable above is being pulled along up the catwalks up over the tower.  Note the bundles of cables already in place.  Working with the 4×5 camera in this tight space while workers are all around me was a challenge.  Hiding the construction lamps by moving the camera was also critical.  The workers would give me just a minute or two to set up and make the shot before I had to get out of the way.

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Here is the end of the cable bundle that is screwed into this massive socket (almost a foot in diameter) for the pulling.  Note that the background spool (of cable a mile long)  is now empty as compared to the first shot.  The cable has already been strung up on the bridge.  This shot was difficult as to hide all the back-lit safety lamps from glaring into the shot.

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In this shot, you can see the cable bundle in the foreground that is being added to the background bundle up the catwalk.  The main group of cables are moving as you can see here in this two minute exposure.  Note the very select focus area of the new cable, its stand and the tower that the view camera allows.

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On next evening, I got access to the Yerba Buena Island Transition Structure, the roadway that will connect the new bridge to the island tunnel.  This image looking back shows the saddle on the southwest corner of the bridge.  The existing bridge is in the background.  Note the worker on the scaffolding to the right of the blue steel structure for scale.

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This view is from one of the concrete structural pillars (which was a bit scary, as it is not flat, but peaked–see below).  This shows the pillars and how high up this view is from the island.

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From the same location as the above shot, I turned the camera 90 degrees southward towards the temporary roadway of the existing bridge to make this graphic shot.  I tried my best to line everything up, but I realized that the bridge in the background is not level (it descends as it goes into the tunnel) and also curves.  It shows how all these complex curves make this process so complicated to build.

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The last shot I did that evening shows the structural bits on the YBI Transition Structure.  It was side lighted by a mercury vapor construction lamp.  Getting all the image in focus was a challenge, as it was even darker than it appears here to the naked eye.  I used a series of flashlights in the image for focusing.  The final exposure was 20 minutes.  At that point, the temperature had dropped to the dew point, making everything dripping wet.  It was time to pack it in.

Every time I shoot on the Bay Bridge, things change.  It gives me virtually unlimited ideas and images to shoot for the couple of days every other month I am out there.  I have been committed to shooting this project for almost 4 years now, and it never ceases to amaze me.

First, a happy new year to you all.

Over the past year, I have been working on a major project photographing the state of closed auto dealerships in Los Angeles.  I started this series a year ago, after reading that GM and Chrysler shut down almost 3,000 dealers nationwide in the previous two years, not to mention over 1,000 more that went out of business by attrition due to the poor economy and other circumstances.  The sheer number of closed dealerships is a dramatic indication of the damage of the current recession.

Economic hardship has taken its toll even in car-culture LA.  It is ironic that so many dealerships would be closed, as there are still so many cars being purchased daily.  For a sense of scale, there are about 232 million cars nationwide and over 26 million cars in LA (that’s 1.8 for every man, woman and child).  Over 10% of all the cars in the country are in LA.  We Angelenos drive over 300 million miles daily.  Sobering numbers, to be sure, and it reflects that the car is an important part of life and work in LA.

Cars wear out and need to be replaced.  But American consumers are keeping their cars longer then ever; the average age of a car in the US in now 11 years old (incidentally the same age as my car).  Hence, a contributing factor in closing some of the new car dealerships.

As I delved into this series, I did some research to discover how boarding up all these dealerships affects the economy.  By mid 2011, an estimated 200,000 people were laid off nationwide due to the systematic closure of the dealerships, putting a major workforce of mechanics, sales and administrative staff out on the street in a stressed economy.  This is not just affecting Detroit and other manufacturing locations, but affects us all in our local areas.

Because of the historical and cultural importance of this project, I wanted to shoot it in 8 x 10 with the last of the color film that I had stockpiled (most 8 x 10 color films have been discontinued).  I shot about 175 views at 15 closed dealerships in LA county over the past year.  During this period, I saw many other boarded up locations in my travels, especially in the Inland Empire east of LA and other rural locations around the country, but decided to limit the project to LA.  I wanted to focus on the impact close to home and as it relates to LA’s relationship to cars and car culture.

In keeping with the tone of this blog, here are a small selection of twilight and night images.

Not just dealers from the “Big Three” of Ford, GM and Chrysler have been affected.  Above is a former Honda dealership.  This is a 15-minute exposure started at twilight, and it was totally dark when finished.  The light on the left is from streetlights.  That is a cloud in the upper right that remarkably stayed in the same shape and location for the long exposure.

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The auto industry has had many types of transitions in the past three years, including the death of several marque car brands.  Above is a vacant Mercury dealership in Downey, a city that has experienced a number of closures.  This facility has a couple of “security” lights on and they are actively trying to sell the property.  I was hassled by security at this location (as well as a couple of others), but when they saw the “seriousness” of camera, and that I was not there to loot or damage anything, the guard left me alone to shoot.

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At this closed Chevrolet dealership, the windows and doors were boarded up and locked down tight in this twilight shot.  Oddly, the Spanish signage ‘esperamos’ translates into “hope”, but with the rest of the words out of view, the meaning is “hoping to see you”.  I think not at this point…

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As you can read on the building, this is a former Chrysler/Jeep dealership.  Security was tight at this location on a weekday evening and I was limited to shoot from the sidewalk.  Nevertheless, there were a couple of good shots to be had including this illuminated “Customer Parking” sign.  It is in sharp contrast to the chained fences at each entrance and lonely parking lot.  Balancing the artificial lights of the sign and twilight was part of the waiting game.  I did get back to this location on a Sunday night and had better luck with the weekend security guard.

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There was a bleakness to this forlorn auto pedestal in the empty parking lot.  This dealer began business in the 1950s, and I can imagine some big finned beauty sitting on this perch years ago.

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This former Chrysler dealership near Hollywood is not so “Five Star” any longer.  Note the office chair on the right which is for the security guard.  When he left for his meal break, I had run of the place.  Careful placement of the camera to hide the very bright and blaring security light behind the post was important in getting this melancholy exposure.  l love the trails of the auto traffic on the street at the left.

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The carefully papered windows of this former BMW dealership contribute to this forlorn image.  Determining the exposure was difficult, as it is lit from the intermittent passing cars on Sepulveda Blvd.  Complex camera movements were needed to retain focus throughout, on this 20-minute exposure.  It appeared considerably darker to the eye than in this shot.

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It was the bright light off to the right, illuminating the weeds of the parking lot that piqued my interest to make this view at a former Mercedes dealership.  The bright mercury-vapor security lamp casting the beam of light mixing with a sodium-vapor lamp over my shoulder adds the subtle play on color.

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The Art-Deco influenced design of this former Ford location, built in the 1940s, was intriguing.  Because of these unusual design cues, I returned to shoot at this locale more than any other.  It was a sprawling location with many buildings and interesting architectural details, like this ‘Welcome’ sign.  Note the staggered glass block wall in the background.  This is a 30-minute exposure night shot using only available light.  This facility has been sold and is being razed soon for a new hotel on the location.

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Most of the locations had a series of fences to keep vandals and homeless people out.  This image, actually shot from inside the dealership, conveys the feeling of the locked down facility with the empty lot beyond.  I shot at twilight with minimal focus on the edge of the gate.

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In this 30-minute exposure, a security lamp is raking light across the heavily textured wall.  The long shadows are from the poles on the left.  The clouds were moving in just the right direction that evening, echoing the roof-line.

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A bright security lamp from the bank next door ATM machine is casting the shadow on one of the old light fixtures from this empty dealership parking lot.

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One of the 15 locations I shot was a thriving dealer in Norwalk in the early 2000s when I photographed it for the architect just after it was built.  Now, less than 10 years later, it is closed and vacant.  By the end of 2011, two of the 15 have been demolished, two have re-opened as used car dealerships, and the others are still vacant, awaiting whatever is next.

Many have asked why I focused on this project.  I wanted to portray the story of the impact of the economy on the many people hit so hard by the failures of the auto industry:  the dealerships, many of which were family businesses; the 200,000 laid off workers; and the millions of dollars lost.  The buildings bear witness and are the scars that remain.  At night, they convey the quiet ache of loss.  Shooting the way I do is more than documentation, as I try to capture the feeling of the locations.

Shooting in the 8 x 10 format gives me the discipline be very critical and selective about what I shot and how I shot it.  Large format has a wonderful tonality and captures amazing detail; the images can be enlarged to virtually any size and retain their beauty and depth.   But large format is also very demanding.  Waiting for 15 – 20 minutes for the light to be perfect is common, as are the long 20 – 30 minute exposures at night.  I usually get only 4 – 7 views per visit.    It was a challenge having to overcome many technical issues and to be patient.

While I am working, I think a lot about the dealerships when they were going concerns, of the people who worked at these locations, of theirs and the dealerships role in the communities in which they were a big part, and of the people who came in to get just the right new car for their needs.  All of us are hunkering down now, navigating the changes thrust on us by these challenging times, and trying to find the best way through to better prospects.

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Here is an image of me shot by my fellow 8 x 10-shooting friend and colleague, Tom Johnson, made with my point and shoot digital camera.  He shot with me on a couple of the evenings.  It gives an idea of what the camera set up looks like.

To view more on this series, I did two other postings from this series early last year, one on a Googie style dealer and another dealer.

With business a bit slow this time of year, I decided to re-visit a location I shot at between 1995 and 2004 at the Port of Long Beach.  This facility loads bulk materials such as potash, sodium sulfite and petroleum coke onto ships.  There are rail cars and conveyor belt systems all over the yard, much of it hidden underground.  They even have their own locomotives to move the rail cars.  Most of the process is automated, but there is a small hearty group that operates the frontloaders and other heavy equipment.

I had not been to the site in about 7 years, so was surprised to see some of the facility has been demolished, including the round sulfur barns, that I photographed in the 90s.  There are several images of this location in my 2002 book, Industrial Night.

This group was shot over two evenings, with a view camera on 4×5 film, as usual for my personal work.

This twilight view on an overcast evening shows a shed that the rail cars are wheeled in to drop their load into the hoppers below onto an underground conveyor system.  The white on the ground in the shed is sodium sulfite, a  white granular chemical mined in the desert about 150 miles from LA.

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This colorful image was shot at night with a very wide lens between shift changes.  Within minutes of completing this 5 minute exposure, the locomotive was again pushing the railcars into this shed.  This facility actually rotates the rail car to the inverted position to dump the product.  The camera is about three feet off the ground for this shot as finding just the right position to block most of the lights was a challenge.  I could not hide the one on the left, although it’s partially blocked.  The ‘light’ at the top is actually the crescent moon moving across the night sky.

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This image is lit by a mercury vapor light spilling from the partially open door on the left.  It has a sense of mystery that caught my eye.  It was quite dark and required a 12 minute exposure.

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This shot of the side of one of the containment buildings shows how these facilities are all about function over form.  It might sound strange, but I find these completely man-made locations intriguing.  There is nothing ‘natural’ in this view, with everything being designed and built by humans to get a job done.  While I was setting up, a worker drove the Bobcat tractor into the position in the background totally by chance.  I quickly moved the camera a bit to the right to get it completely in the shot.  I used front swing of the view camera to maintain focus from the Y-valve in the foreground to the background.  It was “only” a 4 minute exposure which would have required a 30+ minute exposure without using the camera movements.

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About a week later, I came back again and made this shot with the last few minutes of the setting sun casting shadows on this “coke barn”.  This image is all about textures and colors.  Within a couple of minutes this view was totally different.

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This view, using the last of the setting sun gives the gray building a warm glow.  The massive 6 foot high tires in the foreground are covered with a dusting of sodium sulfite.  It took almost 30 degrees of front lens tilt to get the tires and the background in focus, as this is shot with a “normal” lens and the tires are only 2-3 feet away.

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The intense blue of this twilight shot of the rail cars of sodium sulfite have an interesting hue, with a green tinge on the rusty cars.  This is my favorite time of day to shoot, and unfortunately, only lasts a few minutes.  It was a clear night as compared to the previous overcast evening.

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These two rail cars are “white”, but are they really?  With the wide mixture of industrial lamps on them, they become a cornucopia of subtle colors.  The blue/cyan sunset seen between the cars is the last of light in the sky.  The sunset appeared orange to the eye, but if I balanced the colors for the sky, the “white” rail cars would appear an unattractive muddy brown.  This color balance compromise is my version of “artist’s license”.

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This is a study in pipes and conveyor tubes.  Those tubes are about 12 foot in diameter and have a fast moving conveyor belt inside.  The light is predominately mercury vapor–a cold blue green, but there are sodium vapor lamps, including one on the shed on the right that is giving the magenta color cast.  There is almost 2 inches of front rise on the camera to maintain the dynamics of the image and the verticals vertical.

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It was great to re-explore this facility and to find new views.  Considering I shot this location over a period of 9 years, stopping 7 years ago, it is remarkable that there are still new images to be made.  Photographing with this sense of dedication and discipline is what I do with most every project I take on.  In this day and age of shortened attention spans, there are still a few of us who still have the persistence to study a location and the patience to shoot it at night at that, waiting for the camera to make the image.

As many of you know, I have been shooting the San Francisco Bay Bridge reconstruction project for 3 years now.  My most recent shoot got me onto the new bridge sections and access to the new SAS (Self-Anchored Suspension) Tower, that soars over 500 feet above the Bay.

This assignment, shot as a fine art project, is being shot in 4×5 because of its monumentality and architecture-like subject matter.  I can’t imagine switching to digital capture at this point, as it would have a totally different look.  Large format photography also makes one study carefully what to shoot and finding the right perspective.  Time of day is critical, too.  Typically, I shoot only 10-12 views per afternoon/evening.

In this first image at twilight, I shot from temporary scaffolding between the two roadways looking east.  With a very wide lens, I was able to capture both the base and top of the tower.  It is difficult to see, but there are workers about to board the boat in the lower right giving a sense of scale.  This view also shows the new catwalks that will guide the stringing of the cables.

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Moving to the left on this same platform, I shot this oblique view using a different film, too.  The green of the mercury vapor lamps really made the water seem to glow.

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This unusual angle shows the temporary equipment that will help guide the cables around the saddle on the southwest corner of the bridge.  The existing bridge is in the background.  This is a 10 minute exposure, as it was quite dark.

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In this night view, I shot from the main concrete anchorage on Yerba Buena Island.  On the right is the westbound roadway under construction and on the left the concrete pillars that will support the eastbound lanes.  This is a very contrasty lighting situation and finding the right position to block as many of the construction lights as possible made me shoot from a difficult position in the middle of a construction scaffolding with only 4 feet of headroom.  It is a 15 minute exposure.  I especially like the red taillights of a vehicle left of center.

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On the second evening, I was able to get access to the top of the tower.  Here is a twilight view looking east showing the span, the cable catwalks and the existing structure on the right.  All the dark red steel structure is for construction and will not be part of the finished bridge.

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In this sweeping twilight view, we can see almost all of Yerba Buena Island and the skyline of San Francisco beyond.  Traffic was heavy inbound into SF that evening.  The blue structure which seems to be floating is to help with the guiding of the cables.

To get an idea of how much detail is in a 4×5 transparency, here is an enlargement of a small section of this image.  The freeway signs are readable and individual windows in the skyscrapers across the bay are visible.

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I did one final shot that evening on the tower as the light was fading to show how precarious it is out in the open over 500 feet in the night air.  As you can see, there is not much protection on the catwalks and scaffolding and I always walk very carefully and never hurry, especially when carrying a large format camera/tripod climbing or decending stairs.  There is almost always the issue of wind out on the bay, too.  The endless walking, climbing stairs while carrying equipment really gives me a workout, too!  In the end, I find just being in this environment exhilarating and I feel privileged to be part of this important project.

This blog has turned into sort of a travel blog as of late (which has not been my intention), so I wanted to talk about something more technical, but at the same time show some interesting images, most at twilight and at night.

As most of you know, I shoot a lot of architecture and industrial locations–man-made subjects. Keeping the verticals vertical is a challenge, especially with wide-angle lenses. We call this converging of lines the “keystoning effect”, as it has a wedge-like look to the verticals.

I rented the new Canon 24mm and 17mm tilt shift lenses from Samy’s Camera in Hollywood, with the intention of purchasing one.  Renting to try out expensive lenses like these is a great way to help make your decision.  For those who want to see these lenses with reviews and how they work, click here for the 24mm and here for the 17mm.  I found both lenses to be razor sharp and excellent in build quality and smooth movements–even for the heavily used rental units.

The next three shots are daytime shots, but are a good example of what these lenses can do.  They are the first three shots I made and are all shot from the same spot on the opposite corner.  In this first shot, I photographed the old May Company building at Wilshire Blvd. and Fairfax Ave. (now the offices for the LA County Museum of Art) with my regular 24mm wide angle lens.

Note how the building appears to tilt backwards.  It doesn’t, of course, but it is caused by tilting the camera upwards.

Here is the same image shot with the 24mm tilt shift lens with some rise added.  Note the verticals are vertical (the black ‘wings’ surrounding the gold mosaic rounded corner are, indeed, canted and not vertical).

Here is the same view shot with the 17mm tilt shift lens.

Note the much wider field of view and how I am able to get the top of the flag pole, too.  In this wider view, the palm trees add to the composition.  You can fix this sort of perspective distortion in Photoshop, but the quality of the image is degraded considerably.

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On the grounds of LACMA, I shot the Ahmanson Building and used the Rodin statue of Balzac as the subject.  This is with the 17mm tilt shift lens.

I then shot with the 24mm tilt shift lens and moved back 15 feet.  Notice the less exaggurated lines on the building.  I put a bit of swing in here too and shot wide open at f3.5 to add some interesting focus selection.  Note the very different perspective.

The reason I chose this statue is that it is a duplicate of the same Rodin statue that Steichen shot in the moonlight around 1908 in Paris–the earliest known night image using only moonlight).

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Later that evening I tested the lenses in Culver City where I live, where we have some interesting modern architecture in the Hayden Tract area.  These next two twilight images are where one of my photo labs are.  Note the difference in perspective from the 24mm…

…vs. the 17mm view, below.

Both of these images have the basically same field of view (I moved about 10 feet closer for the 17mm shot).  Which is better is a matter of opinion.

Here is another pair of images with the 24mm…

…and the 17mm, below.

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And finally, another pair shot on the overcast night.  The first is with the 24mm lens,

which I was happy with, but also tried the 17mm lens, below…

…and liked the idea of getting close enough to eliminate much of the parking lot, isolating the structure even further.

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The next day, I used the lenses on a commercial job to shoot a new city hall.

In practice, I found the 17mm lens more versatile, getting shots that are almost impossible to get with any other lens, especially for interiors.

After two days of shooting all sorts of imagery, both day and at night with both lenses, I had made my decision and have purchased the 17mm tilt shift lens.

Due to heavy business traveling over the past month, I am a bit behind on the blog posts. For this post, I will take advantage of a trip I made to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to visit family and to have a little fun along the way. Using frequent flier mileage took the sting out of that expense.

October is a wonderful time of year to travel most anywhere, as the kiddies are back in school, their parents back to work, and the weather is usually pleasant. The South can have blistering hot and humid weather, not to mention monsoon rains, but on this trip it was mostly in the 70s-80s with just a few days of light rain.

The first night we stayed at a motel on I-95 just outside of Savannah.  It made for a long day, having to get up at 3am that day for a 6am flight connecting through Denver with a 2+ hour layover connecting on to Jacksonville, FL. The frequent flier seats are very limited and the flights available were not the best, but you get what you pay for. Between the flights and driving for several hours, I wanted to get out and shoot at twilight, where I took this shot.

The four parking lot lights criss-crossed over the two bikes and poles, making for some interesting shadows.

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We stayed with my my wife’s cousin, Jimmy in Spartanburg, SC, a quiet, sedate little berg, made famous as the corporate headquarters of Extended Stay America Motels and Denny’s Restaurants (who occupy the tallest skyscraper in town.) Also, all the BMW SUVs sold in the world are made in Spartanburg.

Jimmy’s  house was decorated to the nines with Halloween decorations.  I especially liked this row of illuminated skulls, photographed best at twilight.

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We drove on to Savannah, GA, a beautiful, historic city that really represents the best of the South to me.  We stayed at the River Street Hotel, with a room overlooking the Savannah River.  That put us in the middle of town, with walking access to great restaurants, bars and museums.  The 4 foot square balcony gave me just enough room to set up a tripod to do a time-lapse sequence.  The following is about 500 individual images over a two and a half hour time frame (5AM to 730am) showing night through sunrise.  Watch for all the containership traffic.  I also did a sunset version, but the sky was more interesting in this dawn version, there was more ship traffic and I like all the early morning delivery trucks, too.

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While waiting for a table for dinner that night, I did this shot from the bar with my mini tripod.

The walls are, indeed pink, as this place is the famous Olde Pink House restaurant.  The light is from a multi-faceted light fixture.  The food was fabulous and a reservation is highly suggested for next time.

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While Lee waited for a table (a 45 minute wait, with no reservation), I wanted to take advantage of twilight and the balmy weather, so I explored within a block of the restaurant and shot these images over just a few minutes, during my favorite twilight-time.

This was shot with the camera propped up on a stone wall.  I love the interesting mix of colors in this shot.  Note the Pink House Restaurant on the left.

These are simply down-spouts, but over the top in design.

Here a chained bicycle is lit by the overly bright light over the ATM machine, which I purposely blocked with the “no parking” sign.

Right behind the restaurant is a church, where I wandered up the steps to make this shot, leaning against a railing.  I like the mix of warm tones and cool tones from the sky.

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While in Savannah, we found out that there was a show at the Telfair Museum with 4×5 large format urban night shots.  Being another photographer who appreciates working at night with the big camera, that was a must-see for me.  The photographer is John Dowell who is a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and the show was called “Harmonic Discord”.  I took a couple of clandestine photos in the galleries, but this link will show a couple of cleaner examples, with a bio on him, too.  The work seemed to have a sameness to them and I liked the abstractions better than the large amount of simple, wide night shots of skyscrapers in eastern US cities.

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On our last night in Savannah, I wandered around the hotel and shot some of the old historic buildings along Bay Street.

The buildings along Bay Street and River Street are multi-layered and they have different types of lighting which added to the look and texture that caught my eye.

As you can see from this image, the lower portions are for deliveries and trash pick-up and are lit with cold industrial mercury vapor lamps.  It appears in this image that the famous red Cotton Exchange Building from the 1880s appears to be a facade with no real footing–but it’s not.  Today it’s a restaurant/tavern.

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We drove on to St. Augustine, FL and spent one night to break the long drive and to explore that city’s historic architecture.  While wandering around the Castillo de San Marcos (or as the locals say, ‘The Fort’), I shot these young teens paddle boarding in Halloween costumes in the inland waterway.

I panned the camera during this half second exposure.  When I yelled to them they said they were off to a party.  It was Friday night, after all!

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This is not something I usually do, but here is a self portrait against the fort ramparts.  There was a bright floodlight that threw the shadow.  I had to do several to get the perspective right and to get one sharp enough for the 1/4 second exposure.  It looks acceptable at this size.

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We drove on across Florida visiting junk shops and taking many photos of nearly abandoned, closed down towns.  The economy has really hit some of the smaller, out of the way towns very hard.  Since they are shot during the day, I won’t share them here.

We drove on and visited my dad and his wife in central FL.  On the afternoon we arrived, there was an antique car show in town, so I took advantage to take a few shots.  The sunset and coloring was so intensely magenta-orange, quite different than sunsets here in Southern California.  I did this shot of a rare 1942 Studebaker, as I liked the mixture of the intense green and subtleties of the warm twilight sky.

It was a whirlwind trip, indeed.

Last month my good friend Rob invited me to NYC for a long weekend together and do the tourist bit, along with a jaunt out to Queens were we each lived as kids.  Being August, it was hot, which made for some balmy evenings to shoot.  The evening I arrived, I met with Kay Kenny, an NYU photography professor and good friend (who also teaches night photography) and we took the subway out to Coney Island where we wandered on the boardwalk to do some shooting.

The old parachute jump has been restored but doesn’t operate any longer.  The red light flickered on for a few seconds during this exposure, but we never saw them again.

-Further down the boardwalk, I was fascinated by this old roller rink, now closed.  It has a colorful mid-eastern theme.  I used custom white balance on this shot to neutralize the overpowering orange sodium vapor lamps.  We were one day before the full moon, which is helping to illuminating the sky.

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There was so much to shoot at night at amusement parks like Coney Island.  I made about 50 images in the rides section alone.

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At around 10pm, all of a sudden fireworks started and gave us a 20 minute show.  You would think as a night photographer, fireworks would be a common theme for me, but in reality, I have not shot fireworks in years.  I felt like the City was welcoming me with this show!  It being the weekend, there was lots going on, with families and friends everywhere.  You can see that nearly full moon and the reflection off the water.

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We wandered out on to the sand.  This exposure is 30 seconds, and the “Welcome to the Beach” sign is waving slightly in the breeze.  I like the rim lighting from the moon (hidden behind the sign) on the trash cans.

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Street shooting in the subway is always fun.  Note they guy with a bass fiddle on his back and the people in shorts as it was quite hot that evening.  This was shot from the hip leaning against an I-beam across 4 sets of tracks with a slight telephoto lens on my Sony NEX-5.

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I wandered down the end of the subway station beyond a “No Entry” sign where there was a bare bulb illuminating the catwalk down the subway tunnel.  Using my handy-dandy pocket tripod, and positioning myself to hide the lamp behind some plumbing, where I made this 10 second exposure.  It really shows how old the subways in NYC are.  It was a lot darker than it appears here and it smelled strong of urine.

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I was walking up 6th Avenue hoping to see the Jefferson Market Courthouse, but unfortunately it was tented for a major reconstruction.  The library is still open late where I shot this image in the side staircase.  The play of light and color caught my eye.

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One of the touristy things we did was go to the Top of the Rock there is an observation deck on the 67th floor of Rockefeller Center.  Sure, there were nice images to be had outside, and I made a few, but I was looking for something different where I shot this in the corridor that leads to the roof.  That green “fireworks” above the Empire State Building is a reflection of a light fixture behind me.  The arc is part of the GE logo on the outside of the building.  It is all about finding the right position.

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How can you go to NYC in August and not get rained on?  We did on two nights where it came down in buckets.  Here are a few street shots near Times Square where you can see how hard it rained.  I shot these from sheltered overhangs.

It is difficult to actually photography raindrops, as the light has to hit them just right, which it did in the above shot.

Police are everywhere in the Times Square area to keep an eye on the guys with bags on their heads!  We spoke to one cop who said just the sight of them keep ‘problems’ down.

We were lucky to get a cab back from dinner that night.

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While we were out at dinner, I set up the camera to shoot a three hour time-lapse sequence from one of our rooms that had the best view.  The window opened from the top a few inches, and we had to put the tripod on a table and stack up suitcases to get it to go up to 7 feet.  Notice the fast moving clouds and off-and-on rain that evening.  The flickering lights are spill from all the signage at Times Square.  The view is looking west down 47th Street towards the Hudson River.

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On the last evening, we were talking about how you don’t see any Checker Cabs anymore in NYC.  I told Rob I had not seen one in years on the streets of the City.  A few minutes later, what do we see, but a Checker Marathon cab parked near Grand Central Station!

The guys in the back seat had video cameras, so I think this was some sort of photo shoot.  The car had no license plates, either.

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One of the things I wanted to see on this trip was the Night Vision–Photography After Dark show on the “history” of night photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The Met is always worth visiting, but with a show on night photography, I had to see it.

It covered the early master works including Paul Martin, Alfred Steiglitz, and Brassai, but also had some contemporary photography.  There were about 40 images displayed on dark blue walls, which I thought was effective.  Seeing original prints of images such as Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Broadway at Night and Berenice Abbott’s Nightview, New York is always a pleasure. Back in late 2010 on another trip to NYC, I had seen a major show of Steiglitz’s work at the Seaport Museum, including many of the famous night images.

Important work from photographers such as O. Winston Link were missing, and there also was no color work which was another disappointment.  I also felt the contemporary work was weak and even a bit contrived , such as the aerial photographs of Los Angeles houses spotlighted by a police helicopter.  I had the feeling that the curator simply pulled night images from the Met’s vast collection.

Several New Yorkers warned me that I probably would be disappointed, but it was worth seeing anyway.  The show came down last week.