Nottingham city council organise a night with floodlights and works of light art from various organisations. I had not been before, and in preparation had a look at some of last years photos on the internet.
Floodlit buildings
The Council House in the old market square was floodlit with a colour changing dome. I worked out that the light gradually changed colour on a two minute cycle. This enabled me to take the colour picture I wanted. The water feature had a still surface for reflecting the lights.
The architectural pavilion, illuminated by Nottingham University Architectural students gave me opportunity to practice making people disappear. I found that providing they kept moving in front of my camera, I was left with a ghostly image. I tried to co-ordinate this with a yellow floodlit dome to make the most of the yellow and red theme. A red dome would have worked as well. This set up was particularly challenging, but worth it.
F16 30secs ISO100 18mm F16 30secs ISO100 20mm
The Old Trip to Jerusalem Pub is a famous Nottingham landmark and has some floodlighting, mainly from old fashioned lamps. There is enough light to see what the building is when using a tripod.
St Mary’s Church was the only floodlit church I found. The road which runs past it has lights and cars and this gave a lot of light bleed to the photo. Not satisfied with my picture, I selected a viewpoint inside the churchyard and photographed the tower from a different point.
F19 30secs 18mm ISO100 F16 30secs ISO100 18mm
The churchyard had a sculpture set up for the evening called “Willow Wonders”. The willow people had a light inside and were constructed from willow. Together, they produced a lot of bright light. I exposed for an evenly lit picture of the scene, but was not pleased with the result as the willow structure is lost in places because the light has burnt the picture out. On reviewing my picture, and having read one of the recommended texts, I considered using a gobo, but am not sure it would work in this situation. I need to make one for my camera kit and experiment with it and see how it works.
F16 30secs ISO100 18mm All taken on tripod
Nottingham at night
On researching a trip to London, I came across an image on a website of a set of traffic lights which appeared to have all three lights on together. I was interested to recreate this and spent some time working out how it was done. I had to observe the timings between the sequence of lights.
Flying Horse Walk has two large flying horses at the entrance. The light made an interesting shadow pattern on the wall.
F22 4secs ISO100 90mm Tripod 1/15 F5.7 ISO1600 110mm handheld
Bridlesmith Walk has spot lighting at the entrance like a catwalk and model posters all the way down. Combined with a reflective ceiling, I thought it would be an interesting photo.
F22 6secs ISO100 18mm Tripod
Store Fronts
These shop windows were lit from outside by street lights and had spotlights in the window. With the first one, Starbucks coffee is reflected onto the window. The first shop window (Betel charity) I handheld and took at an ISO of 1600. When enlarged to 100%, there is some grain on the picture.
The second shop, (Tokenhouse) is less grainy because I took it at ISO800. It appeared that there was less ambient lighting because the road was pedestrianized. I think there are probably more lights in the window.
F4.5 1/15 ISO1600 18mm Handheld F4.5 1/60 ISO800 28mm Handheld
This shop was further down the pedestrianized road from Tokenhouse. The shutter speed is slower because there is less light reaching the camera, but I still managed to handhold the camera.
I came across the barred window down a dark alleyway. The light emitted from the winow is more green in colour on the photo than it appeared to my eyes.
F4.5 1/20 ISO800 18mm 1/90 F5.7 ISO1600 70mm
This is a first floor window display. By positioning myself in the middle of the road, I was able to catch the chandelier above the dress. I altered the white balance to tungsten which gave a more natural colour to the dress.
F5.6 1/45 ISO1600 18mm
Light trails
I found it challenging taking pictures of light trails in a a city centre because of all the traffic lights. The flow of traffic was not continuous. I had to be very patient take several photos. However, there were interesting trails to be had – gritters, lorries, buses, cars with different amounts of rear lights. In the first two pictures, one has a car and one has a bus.
F22 8secs ISO100 24mm Tripod F22 16secs ISO100 24mm Tripod
This was taken on a footbridge with a continuous flow of traffic. Using an aperture of F22, the lights appear like stars. As the conditions were wet, the lights on the footpath reflected onto the wet path showing patches of light.
A busy street at night in Nottingham city centre enabled me to take this picture. I think the traffic lights and building lights add to the scene.
F22 30secs ISO100 40mm Tripod F22 30secs ISO100 50mm Tripod
Exposure compensation –1
22nd February 2013
A large interior with many people
Taking the opportunity to capture a busy modern railway station as a large interior gave me the opportunity to look at raising the IS0 on my camera for interior pictures and observe the noise, shadow and movement of people.
This was rather a reactive shot because of the circumstances that led me there. I had researched the photographic policy of one of Nottingham's shopping centres because it has an interesting clock, escalators, stairs, glass balconies and thought it would make an interesting study. I hadn't managed to get into Nottingham early enough on the night light and the shopping centre had closed. Whilst planning a Harry Potter tour of London, I came across some photos of Platform 9 and 3/4 (complete with shopping trolley in the wall.) With children in the queue to have their photo taken, I took the opportunity to explore the interior. I thought the ceiling was captivating, and have since looked at other pictures photographers have posted on the internet.
1/45 F3.5 ISO800 18mm
I observed the three people stood on the bridge, evenly spaced and all looking at something different.
1/45 F3.5 ISO800 18mm
Standing on the bridge looking across the station interior, the size of the people add a sense of scale. With a landscape orientation, the modern ceiling is not captured in full, so I took a similar picture in portrait.
1/60 F3.5 ISO1600 18mm 1/60 F4 ISO800 20mm
The portrait orientation in this picture shows the structure of the ceiling. I considered using a wider angled lens (10-20mm) and shooting at 10mm to include a larger view, but I think this would converge the verticals more noticeably. I observed that at 18mm, the left hand side retained relatively straight verticals. The final picture shows the curves on the upper level.
At 1/60 the shutter speed is fast enough not to show movement blur of peoples hands or bags. I consider there to be movement of people through the building and their body positions are not all static. All the shadows are soft because the natural and artificial light is along way away from the people.
Without a tripod, I could only achieve a small depth of field which is noticeable when the photos are viewed at 100%. There is more noise than I would have liked. One reason is that I took the photos with an 18-200mm zoom lens (F3.5-5.6mm) and previously for the window shop fronts I had used a 24-105mm F4 L series lens. On analysing the results, I concluded that this was because the L series lens was a larger diameter (77mm) rather than 72mm and is F4 all the way through so it lets more light in than the zoom lens I was using. This is something for me to be aware of from now on.
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