Tag Archives: night

Empire State Building

A work trip required a quick dash across the country to New York. I got into the city at the end of the day and checked in to my hotel for the evening. It turned out that my room was at the top of the hotel and had a view straight across at the Empire State Building. The weather wasn’t great but what are you going to do when you have an iconic building across the way? Of course I took some pictures. I even did a panorama.

When I got back from dinner, the building was lit up nicely. The clouds had not dissipated but, at night, you don’t notice them unless they envelope the whole thing so I tested the low light capabilities of the camera. It did just fine. I headed out of town the following day. It snowed in the morning but was bright and sunny by the time I was at the airport. Too late to get a better shot sadly.

Night Waves

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After dinner one night in Yachats, I decided to go out and see what I could make of the waves crashing on the shore at night. A number of lights were trained on the shoreline from the local properties so it wasn’t too dark out there. Even so, it certainly wasn’t very light. Time to test the low light capabilities of the cameras. The fact I was going to get slow shutter speeds didn’t bother me particularly as I was interested to see the effects that I could get showing the motion of the waves.

Light levels were indeed better than I had anticipated and I was able to get a lot of shots that came out okay. There was a good element of luck involved too. Waves are horribly unpredictable. If you see something good, you can almost guarantee it won’t do it again and, even if it does, it will be ages before the next set of waves comes in and, even then, the big wave will break differently. Also, some of the shapes they make turn out to look good in the shot and others are just indistinct messes. Nothing to do but hang around for a long time and try and lot of different shots and see which ones work. This randomness is a little frustrating as you feel you should be able to do something to improve but, in this case, it is a case of being there.

Mossie Night Run

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Night photo shoots are becoming more popular these days. The Flying Heritage Combat Armor Museum (FHCAM) held one with the de Havilland Mosquito. The evening started out with the plane on the ramp when people were free to wander around the aircraft. I was shooting a lot of long exposures using the tripod which does a good job of removing the people provided they keep moving. However, a few people were hanging around for long periods so they show up in the shots. Others were using the flashes on their cameras or flashlights to look at stuff which made things blow out.

Once we were all cleared from the ramp, one of the FHCAM crew came out to talk about the aircraft. He was the one that would carry out the engine runs and he ran through the test procedures that would be followed for the engines. People had the chance to ask questions and get a good understanding of the plane and how it is operated.

Then came the fun. The engines were fired up in sequence. Then they were run through the test program. The blue flame from the exhaust stacks could be clearly seen in the very dark conditions. When the mag checks were carried out, the flames were even more conspicuous. I moved around a bit to get some different positions. I was quite surprised to see how blurred some of the shots were. The aircraft clearly moves a lot despite being chocked and so some of the shots were totally unusable. This was a lesson learned. In future I would focus on shortening the exposure times a lot to minimize this issue which I hadn’t anticipated.

I also shot a bunch of video while the runs were underway. The edited video is below. It was a fun evening and thanks to FHCAM for holding it. It would be fun to do on another type. It might be nice to have a touch more light on the ramp but the dark conditions did have some advantages. I discovered a bit about shooting in that environment which should hopefully help on future night shoots.

The Constellation in the Inner Harbor

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The USS Constellation is the last sail powered warship built for the US Navy. She is now preserved in the harbor in Baltimore. I saw her a few times from a distance while I was in Baltimore but I didn’t get a chance to take a shot until I was walking back from a reception. By that time it was dark and, since I only had my phone with me, that had to suffice. The phone on the camera has a wide angle lens so, even though we were quite close, the ship is a little small in the original shot. However, she still looks pretty impressive. I imagine she would have looked even better when under sail!

Trying Something Different for the Night Burner Shots

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When the B-1s show up at Red Flag, everyone is pretty pleased. A big bomber with four afterburning engines is like a giant fighter to photograph. It is a good looking jet. It also has a nice feature at night. The majority of the fighters that take off in burner are back to military power shortly after getting airborne. The B-1 is a different story. It stays in burner for a ridiculous amount of time. Not having flown one, I don’t know whether they pull back the power from full burner at some point but they do stay plugged in for ages. Long into the climb you can still see the glow.

I have shot the B-1s from a location out in the area on the extended centerline before. Go back to some old posts here and here and you will see the sort of shots I am talking about. Paul has also shot from out there so we agreed to try something different. We headed closer to the rotation point. The jets get airborne pretty smartly and, the closer in they are, the further away they are from the highway. However, something that had more of a side on feel was what I was after and so we tried a different spot.

Of course, you never know what time the launch will start and when the B-1s will be scheduled for so there is a lot of sitting around and waiting – in the dark. During the day it is easy to hang about and wait for something to move. At night things seem to take longer and you feel a bit more exposed. However, they did eventually launch and these shots are the result. I have learned some new things about the behavior of the camera at night which will be useful next time so, while the shots aren’t perfect, it was certainly worthwhile.

It is Dark at Nellis During the Night Launch

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On previous trips to Red Flag I have taken pictures of the departing B-1Bs as they fly overhead. The burners are really impressive and definitely worth getting a shot of from below. However, having done this a few times, I wanted to try something different. The fighter get out of burner very quickly after they get airborne. They are in mil power for ages before they get to you on the centerline. I wanted to see what you could get from the side a lot closer in so Paul agreed to try something different.

We ended up shooting a lot of side on stuff of departures for the night launch. Unfortunately, we didn’t appreciate just how dark it is at Nellis at night. We had a good moon so we were hopeful that there might be some residual light. It turns out that this is not the case. Even close in, the fighters are out of burner. The tankers and the E-7 went out and I got some shots but they were a struggle, event making use of the best high ISO capabilities of the cameras. The B-1s did show up okay but I still didn’t do as well as I thought I should have.

I learned a bit about the performance of the cameras. I was shooting at super high ISO settings with the camera wide open. However, as I review the shots, I realize the camera was behaving in a way that I had not anticipated. I was shooting in aperture priority with some negative exposure compensation dialed in. As I look through the shots I see that the camera would start out with a dark shot, gradually boost the exposure and then go dark again. I would review the shots and see one that was looking good but know that the next would be dark.

When shooting in such limited light, the shutter speeds are very low and the number of lost shots is high. Therefore, you can’t afford to have the exposure be bad. I don’t know how many shots I lost since they may not have been sharp anyway but I cut down on my opportunities. In future, I need to have all of the exposures be acceptable in order to maximize my opportunities. Therefore, I think I shall have to go fully manual on everything for these shots. Set ISO up high and then go to manual aperture and shutter speed. I will still lose a lot of shots but at least I can focus on dealing with my handholding technique rather than worrying about how the camera is metering a dark night. It’s not too reasonable to expect the camera to get that right every time. It is a pretty extreme case!

Hangar 1 on a Misty Morning

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When I am on a shoot, the main focus is on the subject that you are there for. However, I have rarely had a shoot when I didn’t get some pictures of something else while I was there. The problem comes when I am going through the shoot. I need to get the shots I am going to use selected and edited. The other shots are put to one side and, it is really easy to forget about them when the next shoot needs to be worked through.

While this is a bit annoying, it does mean that you periodically come across something long afterwards when you are running through images for another reason. This shot of Hangar 1 at Moffett Field is just such a shot. I saw the shots while looking for a shot of an IL-76. I quickly realized that they were shot to be a panorama and had never been tagged as such. This time I ran it quickly through the pano function and got the shot out. It was shot early in the morning awaiting the departure of Solar Impulse and I like the misty look in the air.

Turtles at Rest

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The reef by our hotel was home to some green turtles. They seemed to have developed a good schedule. Morning was feeding time. They would go out on the reef and spend their time nibbling away at the plant life growing on the rocks and coral. By early afternoon they would have pulled themselves up onto the beach in an area the hotel had fenced off to keep people away. There they would sleep all afternoon and into the night. Come by during the afternoon and you could see them. In the evening, lights on the beach would be switched on and you could still make them out a little way above the waterline.

No pictures from me of them in action. I saw plenty of them while snorkeling on the reef and sometimes they would come and check me out. You are meant to avoid disturbing them but when they come after you, it is hardly your fault. However, I did kill my GoPro while out snorkeling so the photo opportunities were lost and will have to remain as memories. Shots of them on the beach were a lot easier though so that is what we have here.

The Lions Show Their Love for the Cubs – And Why Not????

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To be fair, the lions are pretty flexible when it comes to affiliations. When the White Sox went to the World Series, they wore White Sox caps. Bears helmets and Blackhawks helmets don’t cause a problem since there is only one team for each sport in the city unlike supporting one or other of the baseball teams. However, the lions do appear to be fans of whichever team is winning! (For those of you not familiar with the lions, they flank the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago and they get into the spirit if a team is doing well.) By now, of course, we know how it all worked out! Let’s go Cubbies!

How Low Can You Go?

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The high ISO capabilities of modern cameras are a constant source of discussion whenever a new camera comes out. It was quite funny to see everyone get so excited about the multi-million ISO range on the Nikon D5 when it was announced, only to see that the high ranges were nothing more than moose with a bit of an image overlaid on them. Not a big surprise but still funny to see how much everyone was going nuts about it before the reality set in.

Consequently, I was interested to see what the new bodies I bought were really capable of. I have already posted a little about some of the shots I took as the light faded at SFO. I was shooting with a tripod and a gimbal mount to make things easier but I was also working within the ISO range of the camera. I went with auto ISO and exposure compensation while shooting in aperture priory and wide open to get what I could. However, I really wanted to see what was possible so I changed to manual mode, exposure compensation and auto ISO to see what could be done. Auto ISO is not going to use the extended ranges of ISO.

I don’t know about the Nikon cameras but the Canon cameras tend to have three extended range ISO settings at the high end. There is the highest ISO setting that it recognizes and then there are H1, H2 and H3. They don’t name them with the actual ISO settings but you know what they are based on what you see on the camera. The manufacturer does not label them as normal ISO settings because they do not stand behind them as a capability. There is a good reason for that. They are just like the highest Nikon settings. Useful if you have no option but not very good otherwise.

The same was true with my older bodies. They had a very high ISO range that was not great but it would do in a pinch. At the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta I shot an Aero Commander in the pitch black that flew over and I saw stuff in the shot I couldn’t see with the naked eye. This is with a camera that is ancient by modern standards. I expected a bit more with the latest generation. Certainly, there is more to be achieved with what we have now. However, post processing becomes a part of the story.

My first experience with these shots was in Lightroom. The shots did not look good at all. However, there was a clue in all of this. The first view in Lightroom is based on the JPEG that is baked into the raw file. It looked okay until it was rendering by Adobe at which point it looked a lot worse. This piqued my interest. Sure enough, at the extended ISO ranges, the shots looked pretty awful. Lots of purple backgrounds. These were not going to be any good. However, the initial preview had looked good., is this a case of Lightroom not being able to render the shots well? I figured I should try going to the source.

At various ISAP symposiums, the Canon guys have talked about how their software is the one that you should use since only Canon know how to decode their shots properly. They have the recipe for the secret sauce. Since Digital Photo Professional (DPP), Canon’s own software for decoding raw files, is so terrible to use, I never bother with it. The raw processing in Lightroom (and ACR since they are the same) is so much easier to use normally and works really well. DPP is just awful in comparison. However, we are now dealing with the extremes of capabilities of the camera. The embedded previews seemed better so maybe it is possible that DPP will be able to do a better job.

You can now be the judge. Here are some pairs of shots. They are the same shot in each case. The first is processed in Adobe Lightroom and the second is processed in DPP. I think it is clear that DPP is better able to work with the raw files when it comes to extreme ISO settings. The shots certainly have a more normal look to them. The Lightroom shots look really messed up by comparison. It doesn’t mean I will be using the extended ISO ranges on a regular basis. Jumping to DPP for processing is not helpful on a regular basis. However, if the need arises, I know that I can push the camera a lot further and use DPP to get something that is okay if not great. This could be handy at some point.