The above pieces have been selected for the NIGHT show, going up at Provence in Hills­boro in mid-April. Please stop by and let me know what you think!

It had been a long time since I’d clam­bered into the woods, dirt under hands and scrap­ing knees, to make that metic­u­lously framed photo. The more found-and-street pho­tog­ra­phy I do, the less of the compose-recompose-recompose-again process I had done. Last week­end was just such an oppor­tu­nity. Walk­ing in Percy Warner Park there was up on a hill a large tree that had fallen across another tree and, over time, twisted away and set­tled on the ground. In the future it will prob­a­bly be a nurse log for other growth. Unfor­tu­nately it was a good was up that hill and too far for any lens to get it from the road. It was a very cloudy day mak­ing hand­held shots tricky at best, and this being under cover of trees I had no choice except to scram­ble up car­ry­ing my tri­pod to setup for the shot.

Shoot­ing with the Leica M3 at 35mm can be tricky. On the tech­ni­cal detail side, this was made with the Leica M3 with a 35mm f/2.8 lens. Expired T-Max 400 shot at 200, f/11 at 1/2 sec­ond. With that 35mm lens there is an attach­ment to the viewfinder to ensure proper fram­ing, but when the cam­era is low to the ground in an already uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tion, it’s tough to ensure that the setup is just the way you want it. With a lit­tle time and patience, that part came together.

Next was meter­ing and set­ting the shut­ter. Get­ting the expo­sure down is thank­fully a breeze with my hand­held meter. Since it was a long expo­sure, a self-timer was going to be used. With the Leica there is a strange lit­tle half-winder on the front that you set, trip to start, and then when the winder fin­ishes it fires the shut­ter. It takes a few tries to trust it — espe­cially as the winder can run whether or not the expo­sure has already been tripped by the shut­ter button.

But when all was done, the photo was made and can now be shared.

From a late-December hike along the Fiery Giz­zard trail, taken with Neopan Acros 100 (shot at 200). Devel­oped in Ilfosol 3 1+14.

A some­what stren­u­ous trail, but well worth the effort. I didn’t bring along a tri­pod so this was bal­anced on a con­ve­nient rock. Plenty of those around for using as makeshift sup­ports! The water was so clear, and so cold, it was amaz­ing. Some­times I still expect all water to be the same as that in south Mis­sis­sippi — silty, yel­low and so thick you lose your hand three inches under. This was the total oppo­site and just beautiful.

There are more pho­tos to come off this last roll of the year, but I had to go on and post this one (which may be my favorite from the walk).

High Falls and Cov­ered Bridge, Dupont State For­est NC

This time of year I’m grate­ful for any chance to do a lit­tle night shoot­ing. Recently on a trip to the Mis­sis­sippi Gulf Coast, where it was balmy mid-50’s at night, I took a series of night time pho­tographs. Below is a selec­tion from that ses­sion. Three or so min­utes at f/9, ISO 100. 5dmk2 and 24-70mm f/2.8L lens. Around 8:30pm mid-December.

I don’t know if this par­tic­u­lar pier was dam­aged by Kat­rina, although I imag­ine it was. And if it had been around then, it would have been com­pletely under­wa­ter for a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time. Enough time that I’m sur­prised at the qual­ity of the pieces that remain. And what remains pulled me towards pho­tograph­ing the scene,  not dur­ing the day but rather at night.

Night pho­tog­ra­phy is a well explored topic (I’ve even cov­ered it before) but the results usu­ally seem to involve (a) urban scenes or (b) starfields. With this ses­sion I was iso­lated on a beach, only a few hun­dred yards from a gas sta­tion and barely a half mile from my hotel, but it might have been total soli­tude. The beach was cer­tainly empty. Even though it felt warm for Decem­ber to me, to the rest of the Gulf Coast it was a brisk night. Plenty of time to setup and con­sider the shots.

When shoot­ing at night in this kind of dark, with barely a moon and cloud cover, there isn’t a great way to know how long to make an expo­sure. The longer the bet­ter, of course, but once you start climb­ing above three min­utes there will be noise gen­er­ated in the darker areas. And at that point, for me, I had just barely started get­ting results. So there is a real­iza­tion and accep­tance that some pho­tos just aren’t going to be great out of the box and will have short­com­ings no mat­ter what the pro­cess­ing. But once that accep­tance occurred, I was able to start visu­al­iz­ing beyond the “full his­togram.” The above image isn’t really all that great with “dark­est darks” and “light­est lights” but the midrange is, I feel, quite well rep­re­sented. And it won’t ever be the sharpest, even though it was shot at f/9 and well focused.

Instead of con­cen­trat­ing on the tra­di­tional mark­ings of a well-executed photo, with piece and the oth­ers from this night time series, I’m savour­ing the flu­id­ity and soft edges of the work. Where the water ends and the wood ends, where the sky is barely delin­eated on the hori­zon. Let­ting this imagery wash over me as an exam­ple of a photo that can­not be taken every day but only by the merg­ing of inten­tional prepa­ra­tion  and loosed control.

Click to view the oth­ers in this series.

Con­tin­u­ing the series started here, I’d like to select another image that I just fin­ished work­ing this week.

This was a dig­i­tal expo­sure, with a Canon 5Dmk2 and the 24-70mm f/2.8L lens. 35mm focal length, f/13 @ 30 sec­onds, ISO 200. It is an exam­ple of the cre­ativ­ity one can encounter with long expo­sures at night.

This par­tic­u­lar place was a bit out of the way from the main traf­fic towards the end of the Pier. My wife was fond of the Juliet (of Romeo and) statue and I’d been look­ing for a way to frame a mix of still and motion, so this loca­tion was a stel­lar point to explore. Find­ing a loca­tion in such a busy area where I could setup for a long expo­sure was cru­cial to reduce vibra­tion and also to be con­sid­er­ate of those around us. With the statue very still but the Fer­ris Wheel in motion it was a shot that nearly framed itself.

The only main deci­sion I had to make besides fram­ing was aper­ture selec­tion. My first require­ment was get­ting the entire scene in focus via a large depth of field. By uti­liz­ing a hyper­fo­cus tech­nique, I was able to get the entire field of view in focus with an aper­ture of f/8. How­ever, that wasn’t pro­vid­ing a long enough expo­sure. By stop­ping down to f/13 I was able to get a longer expo­sure with­out get­ting too far into DLA–land.

Then it was recheck­ing my fram­ing, recheck­ing my set­tings and trig­ger­ing the shut­ter. I did use the camera’s self-timer to reduce shut­ter shake. A bet­ter prac­tice would have been a remote shut­ter, which I cer­tainly would have used if I’d had mine with me.

My long-term per­cep­tion of this piece is still being formed, but my imme­di­ate reac­tion is one of struc­ture, cre­ation and time­less­ness. I almost feel like that wheel has been spin­ning around for as long as that Juliet statue has been there — with both of them placed at the dawn of Chicago and will always be there. I think that long expo­sures con­tribute to that feel­ing of time­less­ness. By extend­ing the time cap­tured in the photo, we extend the per­ceived time that the sub­ject will con­tinue to exist. On some level, isn’t that what pho­tog­ra­phy is all about?

While at the Outer Banks, I did some more exper­i­men­ta­tion with long expo­sures and the water. This is related to that, 8 sec­onds at f/16, ISO 50 from the 5D mkII. I enjoyed the results from these, with the motion of the water while leav­ing the sand and sky untouched.

Next trip will call for even longer, and per­haps some­where that has more archi­tec­ture that engages with the water, but I found this quite sat­is­fac­tory for a first go.