Monster Light For Insomniacs

During the day, sunlight projects shadows down onto this wooden screen, but at night the LEDs provide monster lighting from their positions close to the ground. It is a little creepy to see these larger than life projections in the middle of the night. It doesn't really help that we watch a lot of British crime shows, I suppose. 

Sofa Shots

Is the word sofa actually an acronym for sit on fat ass? I (and others in my life) have certainly expressed that opinion at various times. But the fact of the matter is that sometimes all you need to do to capture a fine photograph is to SOFA. For example, the photograph above is a sofa shot, and came directly out of the camera looking like this. 

Good light to you this weekend. Get your ass out there and make a few images!

Green Scene

Calm down, we're talking about photography. During the day, this is a pretty mundane scene -- downright ugly, even. The vinyl siding certainly is nothing special to look at. But in the mixed light of the evening, everything is transformed. It could be a movie set, or an old album cover from many years ago...

Tasting notes: Sony full frame digital camera, Zeiss 35mm f/2.8 lens.

Vorort des Schwartz

I've read that as daytime temperatures continue to rise, more and more people in warm areas are shifting their exercise and leisure outdoor activities to the evening. It makes sense, but I'm not a fan. Luckily, at first these changes will be limited to the cities. Here in the American Vorort, we should be safe for a few more years to come, one hopes. Fingers crossed. For there is nothing more meditative and restorative than photographing at night.

Mingling with the possums

I enjoy going out for an evening photo stroll as much as the next person, but I have to admit that the possum I encountered the other night scared the crap out of me. You see, I've cleaned up a few rotting possum corpses over the years, so I know how large and sharp their teeth actually are. Luckily, the possum gave me a wide berth, so things didn't escalate. 

Wander Freely

I've always been more than a little curious about the minimum amount of light required to make an exposure. Even back in the pre-digital days, I would often go out and photograph after my shift at work, just to see if I could catch something interesting. I almost never did, but it is fun to discover the practical edges of your equipment's capabilities. With its modern image stabilization system, I've learned that hand held exposures of a second or more are possible with my current digital set up. It is liberating to leave the tripod at home and just wander freely. Even with no moon, there is usually a surprising amount of artificial light available courtesy of your home town. In this image, the illumination was from a single street lamp, but often, interesting mixed lighting situations can be found. The image, while low key, is a satisfying representation of my experience that evening. The yards around the neighborhood that I see every day come alive in different ways in the middle of the night. And, it is about ten degrees cooler to boot.

Seeing in the dark

Increasingly, it seems like cameras can actually see in the dark. For example, this image was made at ISO 12800 using a lens with a maximum aperture of f/2.8, handheld. I am pretty sure this would not have been possible with a film camera. I once pushed a roll of Tri-X to 6400 and used stand development to get the most out of the negatives, but the only shots that looked halfway decent were the ones where the metering was spot on. Underexposure can be the kiss of death with film. These days, I tend to grab a digital camera if I go out at night. And I can leave the tripod at home because of another game changing technology: image stabilization. I'm seeing the world in new ways, and isn’t that one of the points?

The Insomniac Show

I had a big cup of coffee in the late afternoon. I wanted to be alert for the evening's rehearsal. Sure enough, I was dog tired after two solid hours of playing the upright bass, including having to sight read the syncopated parts in Hamilton. Safely home and in bed, the coffee was still kind of doing its job, and I was having trouble falling asleep. Light rain was lashing the glass of the bedroom window and then there was the incessant wind. The insane wind. I was in a doom cycle of not falling asleep, so I got up and grabbed my camera which was nearby, like a child's beloved security blanket. The wind was causing dramatic shadows on the bathroom wall, so I took a few frames. I put earplugs in and went back to bed. 

Monstrous light

When we moved into our house, one of the first upgrades we made was to install uplights on several of the trees in our yard. You see, there is nothing worse than looking out the window at night and seeing... well, nothing. Much more pleasant to look out and see your trees.

Frankenstein lighting is not particularly flattering for human subjects, but I think that trees take on a new beauty when lit like this at night. The first image was shot on an old IR converted Canon 5D camera (the first model) using an even older apochromatically corrected 180 mm Leica lens. This lens is so well corrected that it has the same focal length for visible as well as near IR wavelengths, meaning it is easy to accurately focus the old 5D even at wide apertures close up.

I've heard that the Leica R 180 mm was designed to work best at longer working distances, near infinity in fact, but it seemed to perform admirably here as well.  While I'm very fond of this image, frankly, I'm still trying to make up my mind about IR photography in general.

The colors of photosynthesis

The Rolleiflex SL66 is certainly not the first camera I would chose to take with me on a long hike, but it's totally fine for short forays from the car as was the case on this particular shoot. I'd been wanting to photograph this scene for quite some time and jumped at the chance to get out of the house for an hour or so one evening and do some photography. The magenta hue of these greenhouses comes from the blue and red LEDs -- the colors of photosynthesis. Here, I used the 80mm f/2.8 lens set to a medium aperture which gave exposures of a few seconds (I bracketed).