RECORDING | oksphotography

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Recording: Lighting Up The Dark

TRAFFIC

The first 'Lighting Up The Dark' shoot I did was of traffic. I really liked this shoot because the colours created by the car lights were vibrant and bright. My images were taken using a shutter speed of 20-30 seconds and aperture of f/10 - f/16. I kept my ISO low at 100 to reduce the amount of noise in my images as well as preventing the surroundings becoming more visible and taking focus away from the light.

A problem I had with this shoot was that sometimes there was not enough traffic coming through to make significant lines in the photograph. I fixed this by making my shutter speed even longer to give more time for cars to drive through my frame, or simply waiting for busier periods. Long exposure shoots must be done using a tripod or they will come out blurred, because you cannot hold a camera still for twenty seconds! A couple of my images were slightly blurry due to wind unbalancing the tripod. I fixed this by adding more weight to the tripod to stop it from rocking.

I used a variety of techniques during my editing. In a couple of the images, I increased my clarity to create a quite unnatural photograph as the colour and structure of the lines was so vivid they didn't look real. I also experimented with colour and light by changing the colour tints of the images to produce unnatural colours. A similar effect was created if I increased the exposure/highlights of the image as this brought out the orange/red colours in the lines to an extreme amount.

NIGHT LIGHTS

My second 'Lighting Up The Dark' shoot was of city night lights. I loved the variety of lights I got to photograph during this shoot, including shop windows, electrical signs and buildings. First of all are some very basic photographs of signs. Most of these photographs were taken with quite a fast shutter speed and low ISO because I did not want to capture or lighten the surroundings, and the signs lit themselves up.

shutter speed 1/40 sec

aperture f/3.5 ISO 100

shutter speed 1/30 sec

aperture f/8 ISO 100

shutter speed 1/40 sec

aperture f/5.6 ISO 100

shutter speed 1/15 sec

aperture f/5.6 ISO 100

shutter speed 1/40 sec

aperture f/5.6 ISO 400

shutter speed 1/40 sec

aperture f/4.5 ISO 800

shutter speed 1/80 sec

aperture f/3.5 ISO 100

shutter speed 1/40 sec

aperture f/3.5 ISO 100

During my editing of these images, I increased the saturation, vibrancy and highlights to make them brighter and more colourful. This made the content of the photographs really stand out against the darkness surrounding them. What I liked about the following images was that although they contained brightly lit signs that were the key focus of the image, they also contained more subtle lights or landscape markings. For example, in the photograph below, you can see a brightly lit sign in the foreground of the image, but there is also smaller, darker lights in the background which light up the text on the window.

The two photographs above are very similar. Below I have briefly explained my editing process of the photograph (above right) to enhance the light and colour in the image. This allowed me to show more detail of the surroundings of the lights. First of all, I increased the saturation of the photograph. This made the lights much more vivid and eye catching, compared to the smaller vaguer colours you can see in the other photograph (step 1). I then used VSCO Cam to bring out the light and detail in the photograph by increasing the grain (step 2). Finally I tried experimenting with selective colour in the image as I thought the green tint of the sign was too dominant in the photograph. To do this, I used Leonardo to select the areas of the sign and decrease the colour (step 3). However after doing this, I decided I quite liked the extra colour being present as it made the photograph feel more lively and brought out the detail, such as the text, on the sign.

step 1

step 2

step 3

The two photographs (above and below) were edited using a very similar style of colour and grain enhancements. I really liked the products of these alterations as I thought they portrayed nightlife and 'Lighting Up The Dark' very well.

I thought the following 'Hoopers' photographs fitted 'detail' very well because the lighting of the building lit up the detail of the building. I enhanced this during editing by increasing the clarity and warmth as this brought out the structure and pattern visible on a very interesting building.

To finish off my night lights shoot, I experimented with a few different edits of my favourite sign. The first image (above left) is a normalised photograph of the sign. I then began to increase my ISO and shutter speed to let more light into the photos which illuminated its surroundings. I really liked the grain increase as it reminded me of old photos/retro styles.

SPARKLERS

My second long exposure shoot was of sparklers. I preferred this to the traffic shoot because I could experiment with a wider range of shutter speeds and lighting outcomes (such as words/patterns/symbols). I kept my ISO at 100 because the sparklers were bright enough that extra light was not necessary and I did not want the surroundings to become exposed.

The first gallery photo (of my name) was done by me using the timer on my camera. I wanted to have a go at forming words with sparklers so I knew what to expect and how to direct my models in the rest of the images. I found that the range of your arm width was important to make sure the entire word was readable. If you started with your arm straight out to the side, by the time you reached the end of the word at the other end of the curve, the start and end letters had been cut off. I made sure my models started and ended their words in front of them so the entire word was picked up in the frame.

Completing a test run myself also allowed me to experiment with different shutter speeds. The first image was completed with a shutter of six seconds, which was too quick for slower writers or symbols which needed to be lapped a few times for effect. My longest shutter speed was twelve seconds for the star symbol.

During editing I generally increased my highlights/saturation and decreased my blacks to create a greater contrast between the darkness of the night and brightness of the sparklers. This made them even more eye catching. I often had to selectively edit out areas of the image that were lit up (such as the model's face) as I did not want them to draw attention.

For some of my images I used an additional fisheye lens to create a more rounded effect on the word. This meant it took up more of the frame. The fisheye lens was also effective because it made the surroundings of the photograph completely black, almost like a vignette effect.

Finally, I took a few shots using a quick shutter speed (less than one second) to freeze the movement of the sparklers. I also opened my flash to expose the background of the sparklers. I really liked this outcome because it showed a happy, lively atmosphere surrounding the sparklers.