Night Photography

I don’t often do light painting in the form of light trails, I’m usually more into the colored flashgun technique. The reason for me doing these photos was actually because of a small incident involving a friends car being stuck in some stones. A long story which I really don’t want to bore you with here.

I’m going to do some more light writing and drawing in the future as I think you can be far more creative with a set of colored LEDs than you can with a flash gun and some gels(Well, maybe sometimes… not always!).

This took two people to create as to get the sky exposed perfectly and balanced with the car needed a short exposure! (This was taken at dusk)

This is meant to be fire, the smoke was created by me moving slowly in the background. It worked.. sort of!

This one speaks for its self really. I based it on this sort of thing.

More light painting / drawing can be seen in the flickr set.

Yes, this is another site I have visited twice. Much like the m275 underpass. And you know what? I am still to complete my exploration of this place, I know there is much more to see and hope to return there this summer.

This visit was quite successful and I feel the shots were well worth all the effort of gaining access to the site! Rather than mainly focusing on the amphibious vehicles like last time we decided to head over the the other side which appears to be still used to some extent. The real problem we came across on this side of the site was the large amount of lighting that the other side does not have. Not the most ideal environment for night photography!

Due to the fact this area of the site is very exposed to the road and the lighting situation explained previously it was very difficult to work with my usual auxiliary lighting so I had to just use the available light, which actually turned out in my favor. Here is a selection of images from the evening:

Obviously this shot has been modified quite extensively, it is actually made up from two separate shots. I did this because the sports center in the background has floodlights that were causing flare so I had to underexpose those.

I’m not usually into cropping photos outside of the aspect ratio my camera gives but I think it really works for this shot!

Much more from the evening can be seen in my flickr set.

First of all, this is second post about this place. I went back again with a Portsmouth At Night flickr group as last time it was just me and a friend. If you are interested in getting involved with the group introduce your self at the link above.

I actually visited this underpass again back in January. I have posted about visits after this date as they were too awesome to leave until after I had done these. I really need to get into the habit of getting these entries done soon after visiting sites. Of late I’ve been visiting a lot of sites and not really getting many great shots but hopefully this will change in the summer months with the weather getting warmer. It would help if all of my equipment functioned correctly, but I will tell you all about that in another blog post.

This visit was mainly focussed on playing with flash guns, gels and cool shadows that the structure could create. I took it a bit further by introducing a strange angle which plays with your mind a bit in a few shots. Here is my favorite shot of the evening:

The rest of the images in the set can be seen here.

I’ve been playing about with the flickr API this evening. While reading up on what other people had done with it I had an idea. Last week I stumbled across someone who had uploaded a photo of mine to his stream and put it on his blog (why not just embed it directly, fool!), needless to say I made him remove it from his stream.

This gave me an idea to come up with a tool that allows bloggers, writers or even web designers to search for images that they can use legally without asking the creator. So, after playing about with it tonight I have come up with a general framework which can be seen here:

http://flickr.nightphoto.co.uk/search-free-images.php

At the moment I have limited the search to one CC license, and that is the Attribution License. Hopefully I can incorporate other licenses for a broader search range.

It’s still very messy and needs a lot of work, but I think it will be very useful for bloggers! I know there are already advanced search tools in flickr but this one incorporates the whole process in one page load and has the embed code included in the search results for speed and ease of use!

I recently paid a visit to Fort Gilkicker in Gosport, UK. This place is absolutely amazing and left completely un-touched in most places. Access was relatively easy and wasn’t at all destructive which is nice, it was literally a case of walking through the gap in the fence.

Anyway, I am quite happy with the pictures I took that night but it was very cold so I wasn’t feeling overly creative. This was mainly due to the fact I was more worried about the pain in my icy hands.

My favorite of the night, a nice and simple long exposure of the clouds over Fort Gilkicker.

This is my second favorite from the night, this image really gives you an idea of how old and un-touched Fort Gilkicker is.

You can see the rest of the images taken at Fort Gilkicker here.