A while ago, when I was taking a photography class, shooting black and white film, I did my final project on night photography. ; Nothing spectacular, I just walked around my neighborhood with a tripod slung over my shoulder and looked for things to take pictures of. ; But I liked some of the shots I got. ; For it being my first time I thought I did okay. Cut to the present, the digital age. ; I've been trying again with my DSLR. ; And I'm not happy with anything I get. ; Partially I just feel the composition is awful. ; Either I was better at it then, or less critical of my own work. ; Or both. ; In general I've been feeling that about landscape type shots. ; I thought I did okay at it back then, now I feel that I'm lacking. ; Another problem is color, though. ; In black and white I felt the images worked. ; In color it never looks right, thanks to the high pressure sodium vapor street lighting that blankets the area. ; The sky ends up glowing a pinkish color, and the ground is yellowish or orangish tinted. ; In black and white it looks somehow classy, in color it looks deeply wrong. I'm working on black and white conversions, but so far am not too happy about my results. ; But for now, I do have this one shot. ; I like it, and while that's all well and good I'd like to know what others think. The story behind it is that I was simply testing out a lens that I later returned for sharpness issues (that aren't visible in this shot). ; I had no landscape chops whatsoever, so I just pointed the camera at things and took pictures without a concept of what I was doing. ; I call it my shotgun method, lacking an idea of what would work I just try to take a lot of shots and hope that some end up working accidentally. ; This shot ended up feeling like it had potential, and as for the white balance, I found that the auto setting gave me this result. ; Absolutely not "real" looking, the blue sky is really reddish light reflected back down from clouds. ; The ground lighting wasn't near that cold a color temperature, it was a very odd yellowish-orangish type color. My hope is that it ends up looking accidentally surrealistic. ; Like the blurred trees and sharp ground, almost a reversal of a standard landscape trick of blurring a waterfall. ; Instead of a ground feature being blurred, it's the sky. ; This again wasn't intentional, but it was windy and the long exposure made the trees blurry. I seem to be almost completely incapable of judging white balance, I've learned this from other white balance demonstration pictures people have posted. ; Lacking "realism" as a target, I can't really say if this color is "good" or not. ; So I'm looking for input. ; Is it pleasing? ; Too weird and fake? ; Maybe the ground color is too cold? How about the lines and the light? ; I find them pleasing, but again I'm looking for the input of others. This has left me with a problem. ; I keep trying to mimic it when I go out and shoot more night pictures. ; But I'm fairly certain that this is not something to use as a model. ; There's more that I need to be doing, there must be more potential scenes out there that I'm not even seeing. ; I KNOW there's more out there, hidden drama and beauty in the bland streetlit suburban night. I'm starting to think it's time to take another class. ; I need some artistic intensive care. [attachments posted prior to 4/27/2010 have been deleted by admin. be sure to link images to make sure they don't get removed]
The lines of the street are a little too non-straight for my liking, but otherwise it's a great shot. ; The blending of the colors and the blurring are excellent!
Dan, I actually like it a lot. ; The sky is quite interesting to say the least. ; About the only thing that I would try to do the next time is find a place up the road a little that would get ride of the street light that is filling in the right side of the shot. ; I had a shot at night from my grandparents place, that on the Canon forums people blasted for a street light that was in the far left of the shot. ; Once I cropped it and the are that was lit out of the shot. ; They all agreed it was a better shot. ; Just my .02 cents though. ; Great colors.
I like it too - especially the sky and trees. ; I think I'd agree on not coming at it from the angle, as the lines of the street through the eyes off a bit, and there is a bit of a hot spot on the right from the streetlight - the light coming off the sky and illuminating the trees is very nice and what I would focus on. ; This looks like it would be especially interesting or powerful if you were to try it from a ground-level perspective, looking more up at the trees and sky (but still with the street in the foreground to add depth and perspective). ; I would just do it straight-on rather than from the angle.
Alright. ; That's some decent feedback. ; It gives me a little direction to go in trying to modify it. I'm a little surprised at the dislike of the angles. ; I liked it. ; But.. that's fine, that was the whole point of this. As to the street light.. ; In a way I liked it, but when I look back I can remember that in an early version of this image I cropped off the right side because I too felt it was too much. ; So I'm not all that surprised by the reaction. ; For this shot I left it in because I didn't like making the angle narrower. I can see about moving the scene a bit to the left, to get away from the light. ; I don't know if it'll work, or if I'll have to find a new site, but it's a start. ; I'll try a lower angle too. I had another thought. ; I'm going to try this in the light of a full moon. ; Not so much because I'm hoping to encounter werewolves, but because a full moon might alter the quality of the light for the better. I saw an online gallery referenced on another forum a while back, the photographer was said to be using a full moon to help illuminate night scenes. ; The pictures had a fantastic dream-like quality to the color. ; It may only further complicate my white balance issues, but maybe it'll help.
Dan I like the idea of using the moonlight for this shot. ; I like the angle of it, I just thought that the street light took your eye away from the great sky that is in this shot. ; To me it is almost like something should be there and illuminated, but isn't. The moon idea I think is a great place to take this shot.
I'll throw in my.02, just remember I havent taken a photo "rules" class in a long time, and generally only use the rules as I see fit or remember. I like the angle. The only thing that I might change is to try to recompose some of the chunk of sidewalk out of the lower corner, so all that is in the picture is grass to frame the road, trees, and sky. I downloaded your picture and used the lighten/darken tool in PSP to darken the hotspot at the far right edge a little. I duplicated the layer, darkened the lighting and then made the new layer only 80% visible. What I really like in the picture is that on the right "rule of thirds" line is another bright spot. If I was to go out and reshoot this, I would want to put something there like a bicycle or something. I put an easter egg there just to show what I am seeing. I love the color in the sky. I think I know what happened. Your camera NAILED the white balance of the tungsten street lights and turned them white. When this happens it turns night sky that wonderful shade of blue. If you set your camera to "tungsten" white balance you should be able to duplicate this coloring in the sky. [attachments posted prior to 4/27/2010 have been deleted by admin. be sure to link images to make sure they don't get removed]
Craig I think that the Easter Egg is what I was talking about in my previous post. ; Thanks for illustrating it so well. ; As far as the rest of what you said, I agree, and thanks for the tungsten light tip.
Well, I can tell you it wasn't the camera. ; You wouldn't like the picture as my camera wanted to color balance it. ; Canon cameras are notoriously bad at figuring out the white balance of anything other than daylight and this was a particularly nasty one. ; It was initially in Photoshop, and then later in Lightroom. ; I have a hard time adjusting white balance, I can see the differences but I don't see better or worse, I just see differences. ; It drives me mad trying to color correct things. ; Maybe I can be educated to do it better to some degree, but to a point I think this will always be hard for me. ; I mean people have posted white balance comparisons in the forum, here, with one that's supposed to be the original and one version that's supposed to look much better. ; All I see is one that looks a bit different from the other. So anyway, I initially just used the Photoshop RAW importer and set the white balance to auto, and I got this. ; Then later I used an eyedropper tool and experimented with using different surfaces for white balance, and found using the lightest parts of the road achieved a similar result. ; I did a similar color trick for some other shots and got similar color, but overall none of them really worked like I felt this one did. Craig, I don't give a darned about your education in photo rules. ; I'm looking to see what works for other people. ; Well.. okay, I do care about the official rules, they are there for a reason and I respect them, but I'm quite willing to discard them if I have reason to. ; I'm on a particular mission to discard the rule of thirds, just to try to do it and still have it work. ; And yet I keep on using it instead. ; You just can't escape these things. And I can see what you mean about the egg location. ; But.. I'm a little hesitant to embrace that. ; Much has been said about this and I'm not looking to start a debate here, but at the moment my approach is to capture what I see. ; I don't want to alter the scene, I don't want to impact it in any way. ; I accept that I've already gone way past realism with this image, I don't have any absolute objection to going further to trying to compose the scene, but I'm not quite willing to do that yet.
I wonder, if you are OK with some rule breaking and also want to capture what you see in a scene, if you might not be better off not worrying on the white balance as much. ; Personally, I've seen some 'white balance corrected' night shots that just don't have a natural feel, whereas the uncorrected version presents itself better, even though the white balance is not 'technically' and measurably perfect. ; As I walk around at night, my eyes will naturally absorb or favor certain colors, and colored lights will taint or paint the other colors around them - this is what you see, an imperfect white balance - a too cool scene, a too warm one...heavy on the yellows/reds from sodium lights, heavy on the blues from xenons and arc-lights, etc. ; I much prefer to concentrate on the feel of the scene and capturing the 'feel' of it - what I saw that made me want to photograph it in the first place, but as the camera can pick up more light and color in a long exposure than I can actually see, I like to let the camera show me the effects of those lights and colors beyond my eye's ability to detect it. Just an idea...that maybe in pursuit of white balance correcting and adjusting these photos, you may end up pursuing some technical perfection but missing out on the emotion and atmosphere of the shot that might live in those off temperatures.
Well it's a good question. I'm a night person. ; I'm not a goth person, it's not some issue of walking around wearing black and being all tragic.. ; I just like the night. ; I find it calming. ; I'm sensitive to the sunlight, being out in the sun too long makes my eyes hurt. ; Whether that's due to all my time spent in comparative dark I don't know, but the point is I enjoy the absence of the sun. ; I have been jokingly accused of being a vampire more than once, and I have been known to curse the sun. ; The irony of me saying this in a forum devoted to photography of a group of theme parks built in traditionally sunny places does not escape me, BTW. I've spent a fair amount of time out walking through the area at night or else riding my bike through it, and part of the reason for doing this has been to try to capture what the area feels like to me at night. ; To me it is a sort of dream-like feel. ; The feeling is sort of "as the city sleeps". ; Honestly, a bicycle placed at that key point would probably convey what I'm looking for. ; In the actual location it might not make sense, there's just no reason a bike would be left there and I can't divorce myself from that context. ; But I know that the image doesn't have to be about that, and without that context I can see it working. But my eyes don't capture it as the camera sees it. ; Not that the street lighting makes colors look normal, but they don't look to me like what the camera gets, nor what I end up with any white balance combination I try. ; I've gone to this weird white balance setting because I find it appealing. So in a sense you're quite right, it is "feel" I'm looking to capture. ; But except for shots like this the only feel I've ended up capturing is an almost industrial look. ; The color is all wrong and everything looks artificial. ; For a factory at night it might work, I got a shot of an local quarry and whereas in black and white you just see beams of floodlights, in color you see multiple beams of different color qualities from different bulbs, it still seems okay. ; But not for the neighborhoods. ; Instead of making something beautiful out of the suburban night all I've done is make it look unnatural and wrong. ; Erm.. not that there's not more than an element of truth in that, but it's not what I'm looking to do. I'm going to continue working on black and white conversions as well. ; In some ways that's more appropriate. ; Color CAN work, but by taking the color out of the equation it all becomes about the light and the dark, and in a way that's really what the whole thing is about to me. ; If the power were to go out completely and I could get a picture of the same streets devoid of lighting it would capture an entirely different feel. ; Although I suspect it'd mostly fail completely, instead of light and dark the whole thing would be either dark and meaningless or illuminated and almost day-like. ; You need the heavy shadow presence to emphasize that it is still night even though the sensor can gather enough light to make everything as bright as daylight.
