Saturday 9 March 2013

Bright Lights

I happened to be down by the docks last night and it was fairly foggy, so as I also happened to have a camera with me I thought it would be worth a few exposures just to see what would happen.

Part of the problem of photographing the dockside at night is the intensity of the illumination -- you can practically feel the holes being burned into your camera's sensor -- but the fog was helpfully obscuring and diffusing the more distant lights into a soft blaze.  With a bit of judicious cropping and a lot of tweaking I came up with these:





There's something there, but I need to think a bit more about what it is, exactly.  Those lights in the sky, by the way, are the cab lights of giant cranes, looming invisibly in the fog.

3 comments:

Paul Mc Cann said...

IMHO you nailed it in the first one. Composition is nice with that light hanging up there on the left.

Fog can be difficult to photograph

Kent Wiley said...

Keep at it Mike. These are a great start. Wonderful to see something different, and these are really different. Not only the location, but I don't think I've seen night photos on the Hat before.

As the daylight lengthens, maybe you can get there earlier before it's completely dark. Or are you using the dark for security reasons?

BTW, did you use a tripod? "I'm just askin'" ;-)

Mike C. said...

Kent,

My smuggling operations require cover of darkness, obviously... ;)

No tripod - handheld (elbow on a handrail), ISO 800, Panasonic G3 w. 14-45 f/3.5-5.6 standard zoom (has "mega OIS" image stabilisation).

Mike