You Never Know What You're Going to Get

One of the hardest things to learn about with photography, is that what the camera-lens-film(sensor) combination is not what the eye-brain “sees.”  That’s why we’re so often subjected to someone showing us photographs (at times way too many photographs) where the subject, is so fascinating to the shower, is barely visible to you the viewer.  You can’t figure out whether that blog is even a person, nonetheless relate to the shower explaining how that person is making such a funny face.  The person showing the image recalls in their mind what they saw, and if you’d been there, your eye-brain would have been able to focus on that person as well and the photograph would evoke the same reaction.  But without that knowledge of having been there, the photograph is, to put it blunt, uninteresting and probably boring.  But I guess I’m kind of off topic already.Photography is not as simple as recording what you see.  Over time, you can learn to “see” how a camera sees (I won’t write out camera-lens-film(sensor) - but it is all three), or at least come close to it.  You can learn to “see” in black and white, and you can learn to “see” in Kodachrome (good luck finding any more rolls of it - even so, there might be only one place left that will process it), Ektachrome, Velvia or Provia.  But the reality is, your mind gets used to evaluating scenes based upon experience.  With digital, you can start developing an eye for how you can alter an image’s contrast, color saturation, etc. to produce a final image before you even make the exposure.  I’m not quite there yet with digital, but hopefully some day.

And then there are the truly photographic elements - depth of field, shutter speed, sensor (film) sensitivity - that you can only really replicate by looking through a camera or by making an exposure and then looking at the image.  The eye sees the world at a bit less than 1/60th of a second (that’s why we don’t see lines on tvs [though can if they’re filmed] and why we don’t see flickering at the movie theater as the movie runs frame by frame before our eyes) and we can’t perceive the effects of depth of field (our eyes focus on something, if we look at the area we’ll want out of focus in our photo - our eye automatically focuses on that - and our brain ignores the surrounding blurred out areas).

That’s a long way of getting to the point of this post - often when you go out photographing, you don’t know what you’re going to get.  And when you go out to try a new technique, well, you never know what you’re going to get.  Often, it’s a lot of crap!  And then sometimes . . . sometimes you’re left with your jaw hanging.

After dinner, I asked Ann if she was interested in going outside to do some long photography.  I’d read about it when in Monrovia, and I wanted to see what it would do on the coast, at night.  Now I was used to long photography from my 4x5 days and slow film - a lot of my best photographs were made at 50 seconds exposure at f22, 32 or 45.  The long time was due to reciprocity failure in the film - if a meter said one second exposure, the film needed an additional stop of light (I usually used two seconds instead of opening up the lens aperture).  With a 10 second exposure meter reading, I needed to give 50 seconds exposure to the film to have a proper exposure.  Problem was - this was in broad daylight and film simply could not handle exposures at night.  Back then a fast film was ASA 400, 800 if you pushed it.  Today, with sensors capable of making great images at ISO 1600 -  6400 with minimal noise, and digital exposures being linear with no reciprocity issues - you can pretty much photograph at night.  So I wanted to see what I could get.  Ann, as always, was game to learn.  So we bundled up and headed out into the cold wind and the late evening skies. 

I was able to start shooting long exposures before Ann because not only did I add my polarizer filter (which blocks about 2 stops of light from hitting the film), the camera has a built-in neutral density filter that blocks approximately 3 stops of light.  The two combined allows only about 1/32 the amount of ambient light to the sensor, which allows for long exposure times.

There isn’t going to be too much commentary to the images below except to say that they range from 4-second exposures to 70 second exposures.  You may recognize that I took advantage of my scouting trip from earlier in the day, so the locations are often the same.   Also, I tried to process these so they gave a feeling of evening and approaching darkness - because by the time we finished, it was extremely dark (and we were chilled to the bone!).

It was still pretty bright when we started and Ann simply had to wait quite a while for the sun to set before she was getting 2-3 second exposures.  As I’ve said before, that x-100 is an excellent camera - whoever thought of the built-in neutral density filter deserves a bonus.

Part of what amazes me is how much color there still was in the skies.  If you looked real carefully you could see it, but it was hard and after a certain point, impossible.  The eye quickly loses its color perception at night (I forget which part of the retina - the rods or the cones - handle color), so there was no color at all to the eye.  It was dark and cloudy.  Yet the camera picked up lots of color in the skies, less so on the ground because what light hit was reflected light and thus very blue in color.

The shooting session was one big experiment.  Not only are the waves increasingly undefined with longer exposures, the clouds move too and, at best, are merely streaks.  Playing with different exposure times, working with different compositions, trying to see how much stillness is needed in an image and how much movement to include were all part of the learning process.

Once it got dark, the exposure times increased dramatically as you can see from the bright line along the horizon below, which is how far a vessel traveled during the exposure.  The fact of the matter is that through processing, one could make this image look as if it were photographed during the day.  That, however, looks really odd.

The above photograph and the next one are a bit deceiving, because they both have artificial lighting (a yellowish cast) spilling onto the rocks.  Ann was surprised when she first saw the image below, but I’m used to being very sensitive to the color of light sources because back in the film days you had to either adjust your film to the light source, or use filters to make sure the film didn’t get odd color casts.  Now all you have to do is adjust the color temperature of the image and you’ve corrected for it (that is, of course, if you only have one light source in an image - mix up the light sources and you have a problem to deal with).  Again - the eye-brain automatically adjusts for the differences between, let’s say, the fluorescent bulbs in your kitchen and the incandescent bulbs in your living room, the camera can't unless you're in an automatic white balance mode.  Mix things up and the camera gets confused.

Frozen to the bone, we went back to the hotel (which was the source of the light above) to see what we got.  Like I said, that was a jaw dropping moment.

It didn’t end there though, because as you’ll see later, the next day was clear and beautiful.  Which meant we had to try again and see what kind of results we would get with different atmospheric conditions.

As you can tell, there was a lot more color variation in the skies, and the sky color lasted a lot longer than it had the night before.

Because it was brighter, the hotel lights didn’t have nearly the color altering effect as the previous night.  But in the image below you can see a yellowish cast to the water on the very left and along the shoreline that comes from the hotel.

We didn’t try for some real night photography to capture stars because of the surrounding ambient light, moisture in the air (which would reflect the ambient light and make getting stars harder) and the fact that, for the second night running, we were frozen.  I guess that leaves us something else to explore with our cameras!

Those two nights revealed one of the true wonders of photography - you never know what you’re going to get.