Wondering whether someone could outline the techniques, film and metering in order to achieve night photography images such as these http://www.birke.net/index.html
Wondering whether someone could outline the techniques, film and metering in order to achieve night photography images such as these http://www.birke.net/index.html
they look like hdr to me... but only because highlights aren't burned out and shadows are brought right up
8x10 on Ektachrome, as far as I know-
I'm not sure of his processing, but I don't think that it's actual HDR-
long exposures, definitely-
He's a member here, but not very active. Maybe he could tell you...
I Thought They Used Color Negatives.. Like 160nc Or 160vc
Is his email broken? Instead of getting random speculation here, why not go to the source?
that said, 8x10 160nc, scanned.look him up on flickr. he also posts here on the forum I believe.
Photos 2 and 3 appear to be washed out, perhaps overexposed as well as made in the early part of twilight.
If you have been following the Night Photography thread there is a lot of information as well as references in that thread that should be helpful.
My preferred film is Portra 160 VC. Because I like a deep blue sky, my rule of thumb is to wait until about 40 minutes past sunset (you can get the time from the Naval Observatory site if you don't have other sources such as a GPS).
I make three exposures all with the aperture set between f/8 and f/11. The first exposure is for two minutes. Right after that I make a four minute exposure. Then a ten minute exposure.
How did I arrive at this procedure? I started doing this 8 or 10 years ago so I will try to reconstruct to the best of my memory. The starting point is to meter the sky. This gives the 18% gray reading, but I usually want it an EV or so darker. In the urban setting you might want to meter the buildings, but not the areas where there are lights, to decide if the buildings will be too dark or too light. You may want to make another exposure adjustment.
Don't worry about the lights. These are specular highlights that are going to blow out anyway. Fortunately, with the modern films there is very little blooming about the highlight areas.
Now Kodak's Technical Data for Portra films, E-4040, says that any shutter speed from 1/1000 to 1 second can be exposed normally. As far as reciprocity failure is concerned at the longer shutter speeds they suggest that you test. I cannot recall the exact "normal" exposure that I metered at the time but it was probably around 20 to 30 seconds.
So for my exposure at 40 minutes past sunset I assumed a factor of around four leading to a two-minute exposure. When using long exposures it doesn't hurt to make them longer than you think would be right. Remember that when in the twilight zone, the light is fading and there is not as much light at the end of the exposure as there was in the beginning.
The four-minute exposure is done with less light and more of an allowance for reciprocity failure. Then the ten-minute exposure with less light and even more allowance for reciprocity failure.
As it turns out, these exposures all work well. I usually prefer the four-minute exposure because at that time there is a little more terrestrial detail in the shadow areas.
There is no precise formula for working out these exposures. It is a combination of metering and using your judgment as to what adjustments you intend to make for your meter readings with regard to the zone of the areas of your subject. Then you need to consider the reciprocity factor. If the "normal" exposure is very many seconds try increasing it by a factor of two, or four, ...etc.
Hope this helps.
al
He posts on Flickr as http://www.flickr.com/photos/move_lachine/
I'd forgotten he's switched to neg, I should have looked it up-
earlier work is on velvia, maybe there was some Ektachrome at some stage...
Probably just shot and scanned normally, and I would do like Al. When it's a total guess I like to bracket by a factor of two stops so you can actually see a noticeable difference in the neg....
There's some good info in his blog:
http://thomasbirke.com/
Why not? Just wondering.Once aperture is set, you cannot change aperture for the 2 exposures (all exposure is done using the shutter).
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
--A=B by Petkovšek et. al.
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