This week's assignment was to experiment with night photography. This past weekend I went up on our roof and played around for a few hours starting at sunset. The shots below were the best of my results, and I was planning to go out for more again this week to correct some of the problems I discovered when I examined my photos on the computer--unfortunately the weather has been brutally cold and wind, so I couldn't really get back out with my tripod for long exposure shots like this. I'll play around with this some more over the coming weeks, as I really do like the effect of night photography.
Regarding the shots below, I find them all visually appealing, but each has a problem of it's own... Because of the dim lighting, I relied on my camera's preset white balance settings, as evidenced in the first shot, which is so blue that color correction in Photoshop was futile. Nonetheless, I like the mood it creates in this instance (though I know that isn't the point in this class!). In the second shot, the color temperatures in the foreground and background are so different my camera didn't really know what to do--this shot was taken with tungsten white balance, which seems to have done nothing to correct for the yellow lighting below. The shot is also overexposed, but I felt it was worth preserving, if only as a comparison point when I try this shot again in better weather... The third shot is, I think, the best of the bunch in terms of exposure, though it has such a high dynamic range there are both under- and overexposed areas. All in all, these shots aren't technically excellent, but I'm looking forward to improving on them.
Email me if you'd like to see the high-res version of any of these images.
