Day 18: Night photography

What will you do when the sun sets and the lights turn off?

As a photographer, you have many ways of capturing the same subject or theme using different techniques to bring up different aesthetics.

For this task, I was asked to capture the essence of nighttime, the cool tones, the deep shadows, the mystery and isolation, without the use of long exposure as I did a couple of challenges back.

I needed something different this time. I knew I had to play with ISO, cracking it up to about 3200 and introduce some noise, so I was looking for a subject that would isolate itself in the dark.

I started by taking pictures of small, dark alleyways, abandoned bikes and telephone booths. Nothing seemed to work. Those were images seen before. Also, there was no colour in any of them. Apart from that washed yellow light from the lamp post.

After more than an hour in the cold streets of London, I started giving up, thinking that I will need some great editing skills to make my images stand out. Until I came up against the building in this picture.

It was the most beautiful sight I saw that night. The colours, the patterns, the shadows, the isolation, the bikes on the balconies… Everything blended harmoniously in this unique synthesis. That was the subject of my study!

I ended up using my 24mm lens with 3200 ISO at f/5.0. I had lots of darks and shadows to play with, so I introduced some noise and artificial exposure during post.

This capture is one of my favourites so far.