The Daily Photo #24-January 24th, 2016
Powerline
Photography can be pretty good at showing you the way something looked at a certain time. Not perfect, but pretty good. Photography can also show the way we felt about a subject at a particular time or how how we thought something should look. For these, and other reasons, most photographs tend to be subjective representations, as opposed to objective. They are not exact copies of real life, and can sometimes lie.
Long-exposure photography at night can also cause things to appear differently than they would under the daytime sun. I get a different sense of the available light, and I tend to look for different subjects than I would in daylight. Light seems to act differently at night and at longer shutter speeds. What seemed like faint, dingy light, can turn out to look soft and detailed in the final exposure. Colors that you weren’t aware of can show up, and detail can appear in places you had never expected.
This turned out to be a pretty good black and white study in lines and textures. The warm colors of the sodium vapor lights hitting the powerline, against the deep purplish-blue of the night sky made the file very malleable to b&w color channel adjustments in Lightroom. As a bonus, the stars are so far out of focus at the aperture of f/5 at 145mm focal length that they rendered as little bokeh balls in the sky. It was the first I had noticed night-star bokeh in one of my photographs, but I will be looking now.
I used a Manfrotto tripod to support the Canon 1Dx with a Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS II lens. The camera was on 2 second delay timer to prevent camera shake. I also made sure to turn off the IS on the lens, to prevent the lens shift in the IS element. It’s not everyday that I have a 70-200mm lens out from the rental department, so I decided to shoot some long exposures tonight, and I just really liked the light at these exposure settings.
5.0 sec @ f/5.6 at ISO 640, 145mm focal length.
Gear used:
- Canon 1Dx body
- Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II
- Manfrotto MT055CXPRO4 Carbon Fiber tripod
- Lexar 64GB CF Card
See you tomorrow!
