Ever since I bought a second-hand tripod several months ago (to replace the one left behind in our still-unsold French house), I’ve had an itch to go out and do some evening photo shooting. Last night I finally scratched the itch.
For some reason, I’ve always loved the idea of taking pictures at night — something about the stillness and serenity of the process is peculiarly attractive. As a college student back in 1977, when I bought my first grown-up camera (a Minolta XG-1), just about the first photo I took was a midnight shot of the colonial-era Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg. It’s long gone now, I’m afraid — the picture, not the church — but it was a pretty decent photo.
California’s Central Coast is a fantastic place to take sunset pictures, because the sunsets here are frequently opulent — all sky and sea and gnarly coastline, often festooned with big, gaudy piles of technicolor cumulus. I’ve been that route a number of times, as shown in my recent post for the Ocean’s Edge show at Marina Square. For my sunset photo last night, though, I cut against the grain and went for something more monochrome [below]. This is a shot across the back bay from Los Osos toward Morro Rock.
This picture was a real departure for me — much more stylized and planar than I usually design — but I found the result very arresting.
As twilight segues into night, the seaside towns around here come alive with brightly-lit restaurants, bars, and movie theaters. One such restaurant, overlooking the piers in Morro Bay, was the subject of my other finished photo from last night [top]
The long exposure (about 10 seconds at F16 and ISO 100) gives this picture the kind of timeless, enchanted feeling that I love so much in my favorite night shots. The stillness is reinforced by all the vertical accents — pier pylons, window frames, radio antennas, and that gorgeous spread of orange reflections in the lower right, all leading up to the stub of smokestack from the old factory.
Itch scratched.
Other stuff I’ve been working on
It’s an ongoing process, digging back through my “back catalog,” which is a rather bloodless way of referring to the photographic record of the life I’ve lived up until now. Or, to borrow a phrase from a grad school friend of mine, “the slime trail of the slug of history.”
Anyway, I was recently pawing through the images from Carol’s and my early morning visit, a few years ago, to the Acropolis in Athens, and I was particularly pleased with this one:
On one hand, yeah, this same shot is taken about ten thousand times a day by tourons; but I felt like this iteration was particularly clean, in bright morning sunshine with a perfect blue sky. Anyway, time allowing, in the near future I’m going to clean up some more of the photos I got that day (including a few images of the less-photographed aspects) and throw them out here to see what you think.
In the meantime, stay frosty.
Ronald Crittenden 