Digital Night by Harold Davis
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Publisher: Wiley Publishing.
Publication Date: November, 2009
Amazon link
From the back cover:
The night is an uncharted universe filled with surprisingly rich color, texture, and mood---just waiting to be
captured by your digital camera. But the challenges of night photography are significant.
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Learn to see another world. Enter into the unknown: become a creature of the night.
- Experience the joy of night photography
- Get the right equipment for shooting in the dark
- Learn how to expose photos at night
- Extend the dynamic range of night photos
- Capture star trails
- Minimize noise in night photography
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Conventional photography has exposure times measured in fractions of seconds. In contrast, the exposures of night photography
are in seconds, minutes, and hours. As my experience as a night photographer has grown, it seems that my exposures have grown longer.
There are many night photography ideas and techniques on my site. If you're new to night photograhy and to my work,
here are some places you might want to begin:
Night Photography Techniques Webinar
(second webcast);
Night Photography Webinar (first webcast);
About Harold;
Hannah Thiem interview with Harold;
Awards, Exhbits & Publications; and
Workshops & Appearances.
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With the boys tucked safely in bed I headed out into what proved an increasingly moist night. Wet fog enveloped most of Yosemite Valley, but there were odd pockets of open sky. From Swinging Bridge, I had a pretty straight shot at the stars over Yosemite Falls. The falls
themselves were partially hidden by the darkness and fog, but the entire cliff face was illuminated by the light pollution from Yosemite Lodge....
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Many of my night photos are created in homage to Vincent van Gogh, who wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day.”
The star swirl in this image seems particularly van Gogh, so I thought I’d name this one Starry Night, after one of his most famous works....
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Against the backdrop of pounding surf and a light mist on the ocean, I photographed star trails behind Point Reyes Lighthouse in this portrait of the edge of night....
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It was damp and a bit chilly in the dark, and for a while Mark and I left my camera on autopilot and sat some distance away in my car, listening to the superb and eerie music of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. After twelve exposures (about 48 minutes) our patience wore out and weariness won. Mark had a plane to catch in the morning for a business meeting,
and I’ve been going on fumes since Katie Rose was born. I stopped the automated exposure process, and packed it in....
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As dusk darkened to night, my exposures got longer and longer until the swirl trails of the stars echoed the swirls in the rock of the Wave.
To take this photo, I needed to wait until darkness out in the desert with the ordeal that was to come. But, I say, since all’s well that ends well, well worth it!
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It all started when I pointed my digital camera into the void of night and was surprised by the results.
In apparent darkness, there's plenty of "light" we cannot see that is picked up by digital sensors.
The digital night landscape is very colorful indeed. Since this discovery, I have haunted dark and wild landscapes at night...
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Looking south from Arch Rock the twilight turned to night. Individual stars turned to the star-filled night sky and banks
of fog shifted in the night wind. Down below, big rollers crashed on end of their journey across the Pacific.
The remaining ambient light from the sunset over Point Reyes slowly faded.
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OK, let’s start with two questions. Would you think this photo was taken into almost complete night?
And why would someone go to a great deal of trouble to hike out into the wilds somewhere,
mount their camera on a tripod, and take a long time exposure into total darkness?
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Photographing at night can be literally a trip into the unknown, dark and impenetrable. Often you can see neither your photographic subject nor your camera controls. You may be flailing around in the murk and gloom, at some risk of tripping over
obstacles or falling down unseen cliffs. Read more |
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If you look at the Exif data for this image, you can verify for yourself that this was a long exposure, thirty seconds, with the 10.5mm digital fisheye lens wide open at f/2.8. But it really doesn’t look like a long exposure in almost complete darkness should look. In fact, I bet if you were shown this photo and didn’t know any better,
you would think it was taken in the daytime, perhaps the late afternoon (with the incoming storm). Read more |
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Coming up the trail from Kirby Cove, it was fully night. Not a pitch black night, because there was a sliver moon and light pollution from the bridge and city. But as dark as it was going to get.
Up on the fortifications of the Marin Headlands, I decided to see how long a time exposure I could make of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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