Cities based along a body of water lend themselves to night photography. The skyscrapers glow upward from the streetlights below, and reflect their multicolored light onto the water.
The night was just windy enough to gloss over the water, and make for a classic ‘postcard’ shot.
This is a shot of UC’s newest residence hall, shot from the balcony of my third floor suite in Sawyer Hall.
Somehow, the building doesn’t seem real. It looks like the computer renderings the University shows to all the prospective students.
The University’s Engineering Research Center, designed by PostModernist Michael Graves. I always love shooting buildings at night – the lights in the windows just cause them to glow with a vitality that oddly seems asleep during a bustling business day.
I took this shot from the twelfth floor of Daniels Hall
Another event with more of a practical purpose is the Dawn Patrol. A series of balloons are sent up an hour before dawn to test wind conditions at various altitudes. Hot air balloons are incredibly sensitive to changes in the weather, and sending a thousand into the air – surrounded by 10,000 spectators – requires a few precautions.
Janelle Kelpe and I set out on the town with a tripod and a few cameras – my digital Fuji and her film Olympus. I took 58 shots over about three hours (from 10pm to 1am). These two are probably the best, at least of the horizontal shots.
With the aid of a tripod, I’m able to set my ISO sensitivity to a nice, low 160, which helps reduce the grain of an image (unfortunately, web images more than make up for it).
Nonetheless, we were able to visit a number of famous sites in order to get the standard “Postcard” shots – Spanish Steps (currently clad in a most un-picturesque scaffolding), Piazza Barberini, Trevi Fountain, the Vittoriano, the Pantheon, the Imperial Forum, and the Colosseum.
Taken at F11 with 160-speed “film” over a period of six seconds. I was having trouble getting a shot without cars, even at almost 1am, so I decided to incorporate them into the composition.
