Night Shots

I haven't done much night-time photography recently - in fact, not since I last used a film camera to capture Venice after dark. Tonight, there was a fantastic scene out of the living room window, of a full moon in a clear sky with plenty of clouds around for texture. I got out the DSLR and tripod and spent half an hour in the garden taking shots of the sky. Here's one:



The exposure was 20 sec at f9, and the clouds were moving quite fast, which created a flowing and fuzzy effect against the sharp and static trees. I thought it was quite atmospheric.

When I got back to the house, the bike was in complete darkness, so I thought I would try something I have never done before - light painting. I set up the camera on a long exposure (I let Mr Nikon work out how long - about 30 sec at a guess) and then waved a torch over the bike fairly randomly until the camera had captured enough light to call it a day. It's no work of art, but at least I have proved that the technique works. It really was dark - you could hardly see the bike at all. There are possibilities here. I might try some more of this on Bonfire Night.



The original images were about 3MB, and I wouldn't win any friends for posting them here, so regard these as thumbnails.

Pictures of Old Russia

Via The Boston Globe, I saw this collection of photographs, which I thought were worthy of a post.

Working for Tsar Nicholas II, the photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii did a photographic survey of the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1912. The American Library of Congress purchased the plates in 1948. He was clearly a talented photographer, but what makes the images astonishing is that they are in full colour, at a time when the First World War had not even begun and the Soviet Revolution was several years in the future. He used a specialised camera which took three images in quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, and the images were later combined in a projector to produce the full-colour shots that we can see today.

There is one image (27) where the three constituent images have failed to register correctly and you see the cheap-binoculars effect, but otherwise the colours and the resolution are stunning. We are used to seeing old photographs, but the usual images from that period are sepia or crude monochrome, with poor resolution and often evidence of damage or poor storage. These shots could have been taken yesterday. Image 28, of the Emir of Bukhara, would not look out of place in a modern National Geographic magazine.



Go and have a look, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.