Tom Paiva's Night Photography Blog

For this post, I had planned to show some images done at twilight and at night of fireflies (lightning bugs), since I had never tried shooting them before (they are an east coast summertime critter).  I was able to get several of them recorded as they darted about.  Unfortunately, they accidentally got deleted from the card when re-formatting.  Such is life in the digital age…

Instead, I will show a few images shot with my Sony NEX-5 when on a trip to Virginia last week.  Living in Los Angeles, we get very little rain and very rarely lightning, so it gave me a chance to shoot something different.  In the next three images, which were shot within 5 minutes of each other, you can see how different they look.  The first shot was done early in twilight with a light rain.  It was the umbrella that prompted me to shoot this.

I wandered in and out of the lobby of the hotel just observing, and came back out and noticed that it had stopped raining and the sky had become a bit darker.  The umbrella was gone, but I shot it anyway.

Note the nice warm tone from the lights from the lobby and the lights on the median, which is now brighter than the blue overcast light in the previous image.  After chatting with the bellman for a couple of minutes, the sky opened up and it began to really come down.

Note how in this version, the pouring rain has flattened the contrast, especially in the trees.  These are all quite different images in feeling and tonality.  Which works better is a matter of taste.  These are all hand-held at about 1/15 to 1/8 of a second.  You can’t tell here, but it was quite warm and muggy.

Later that evening the rain storm moved on, but there was still some distant lightning.  Here is an exposure of the side of the hotel, with the mixed lighting.  I wanted to try and capture a flash of lighting in a two second exposure.

What I did was to put the camera on continuous shooting of two second esposures and was willing to shoot as many until I got a flash of lighting.  On the 6th shot I got the one above, on the 7th, *pop*, a flash of lighting lit the sky and I got the image below.

The glow in the sky gave it a twilight look, but it is indeed a night shot.  I liked how the blue light opened up the lower left of the image reflecting off the wet pavement and how you can now see through the tree.  This was the keeper of the set.

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The previous week, I was working at the University of CA, Berkeley for a client who has been working on the seismic retrofitting of the Greek Theater.  I had not been to the theater in decades, and had never seen it empty.  They were setting up for the first concert since re-opening for the Beach Boys that Friday night.  Of course, I shot images in the daytime of the details of the project, but the overall shots at twilight were my favorite.  The next three images, shot seconds apart, were made with my 17mm tilt-shift lens and show it’s capability for shooting architecture.  All of these twilight shots and many others were done in a 15 minute time frame, taking advantage of that short window of twilight-time.  I had scouted all the best views in the daytime and got a work out running up and down the stadium rows in that short period.

This theater is a small, intimate one, but I wanted to show the sweeping grandeur and the surrounding environment.  I very wide lens like the 17mm worked well.

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One of the advantages of a shift lens is that you can keep the camera locked in position on a tripod and change the view.  The above view shows more sky by raising the front of the lens only.  It shows less of the seats and foreground, giving room for text in the sky area if used for publication.

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In this third view, I shifted the lens down to show more of the seats and less sky.  This version has tendency to give an anchor of the theater itself for the proscenium arch.  The camera was not moved for any of these three images.  The client got all three for whichever use they needed.

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In this elevation view the mixed lighting on the “VIP” chairs in the foreground balances nicely with the proscenium arch. Note how that bright light on the left did not flare in this view.  The prime (single, fixed focal length) 17mm lens is very well engineered, handles specular lights well (with minimal flare and halation) and is extremely sharp.

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In this oblique view I thought the chairs were a bit to dominant, so I quickly switched to a moderate zoom lens, below for a tighter shot.

The chairs are less dominant, but note the verticals are no longer vertical because I had to tilt the camera upwards (it’s a fixed lens, like most lenses).  This distortion of the verticals is call “keystoning”.  You can also see flare from all the lamps in this shot.  Prime lenses handle flare much better than the best zoom lenses.  Yes, these are all fixable in Photoshop, but I feel it’s best to make the cleanest image possible at the time of exposure. All of these shots of the Greek are straight from the camera, with no manipulation.

Over the past few weeks, I have been shooting at some chemical company storage “barns”, which are really long buildings (some 1/4 of a mile long) that store coal and petroleum coke.  Coke is a by-product of the refining of gasoline and looks similar to coal, used in the manufacture of steel and as a fuel in some power plants.

Inside these barns which are quite dark, even in the daytime, it was a challenge to shoot.  The fine black dust got into everything, and the light from 50 foot lights and daylight spilling in from the open door does not add much.  The product is flat black, as is much of the interior, which absorbs the light.  Exposures were in the multiple minute range, and could have easily been longer.  Because the final use of these images will be 50-60 inch prints, I shot them all in 4×5.

In this 5 minute exposure, most of the light is coming from the entrance and a bit from the ceiling fixtures.  This is much brighter than how it appeared to the naked eye.

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This shot was done from the open door and it shows the lights from the ceiling.  They are a mixture of mercury and sodium vapor, giving the green and warm orange color.  The blue light on the ground is daylight.  All this material is flat black–even that 40 foot pile in the background.  The holes in the floor are for front-loaders to push the material in which go on to conveyor belts, below.  I had to be very careful not to step back into these 10 foot deep holes.

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I had the escort turn off the overhead lamps for this shot.  What you are looking at is the sunlight coming through small holes (one inch or less) in the ceiling.  The black coal or coke dust being struck by the sunlight makes for these beautiful rays.  They were very sharp-edged beams of light, but because of the 6 minute exposure, the beams moved with the sun, softening the edges.  All the light in this image is from sunlight.

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In this shot, I wanted to show a sense of scale, so I had the escort drive his white truck into the barn and slowly drive down one side, taking 45 seconds, then turn and stop for another minute.  This showed his taillights and yet made the truck show up after he stopped.  I then closed the shutter, had him drive back (he could not cross because of the holes in the floor for the converyor system).  I then sent him down the other side, doing the same thing.  The combined exposure is 4 minutes and it appears to be two trucks, but there was only one.  This was all done in camera, on one piece of film.

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Here is a night shot of the end of one of the barns.  They are massive concrete structures.  In earlier, less enlightened times, there were no roofs on these facilities, but today environment laws require them to be covered to keep the black soot down.

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Here is a twilight view of part of the barns and conveyor system.  Much of the conveyor system is under ground.  This is only a small part of this huge facility.  The red lights are from a truck coming out of the building on the right after dumping his load.  This facility operates 24/7.

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This view was taken from the catwalk of the building on the left in the image above, of course on a different night.  That is downtown Long Beach in the background.  There was so much vibration because of the conveyor system, that we had to shut it down for this 2 minute exposure.  This shot would have been impossible otherwise.  Via radio, we held the truck in the lower right and made sure he left his lights on.  Having people in control of the plant that can control lights and other infrastructure is so important in a location like this.

I’m looking forward to seeing which images they choose for their new offices.  There were many daytime shots made, but I’m sure some of the shots chosen will be the twilight and night views.

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On a different note, last night was the solar eclipse, and did not expect to shoot it, but as luck would have it, the clouds started to roll in and you could look at the eclipse with the unprotected eye.  I went and grabbed my digital camera with a 400mm lens and shot this image, hand-held.  I used the “live view” feature to protect my eyes.  Exposure is 1/500 second at f8.  We are within a few minutes of the maximum of 85% here in Los Angeles.  Within 10 minutes the clouds got so thick as to obscure the eclipse, and it was done…

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.