“How would I shoot this at night?” – That’s a question I asked myself a lot during the fall color season.  What I found was that most often, it’s a totally different way of seeing a scene (no puns intended here).  For example, unless I’m shooting a sunrise or sunset, I’m generally working as hard as I can to eliminate the sky from my compositions.  Take these images I posted of various stream scenes as illustrations of the point. Only the very first image has a tiny little speck of sky visible in it.   For my night images, however, I’m typically doing the opposite, because I’m wanting to show off the sky, in addition to whatever my foreground is.  The composition still has to work, of course, but I approach it differently.  

Often times the answer to my question would be, I think I’ll just have to see it.  That was the case here with this week’s Picture of the Week.  I knew how the sky lined up, I knew generally where I wanted to shoot it from, but what I couldn’t quite imagine was how dark that hole is where this cascade lives, and just how I was going to light it all up so that it looked nice.  Often times when I’m using lights at night, I want it to be really obvious that I’ve used a light.  For these stream scenes, however, I was finding that the only easy option was to front light the cascade, but that’s not usually the most attractive way to illuminate a subject.  Where I landed was just trying to somewhat emulate moon light, using extremely long exposures for lighting in the distance, and then a very light-handed approach to the water – which was admittedly a challenge, given how white the rapids are.  Anyway, I’ll let you be the judge how all that worked out.  I’m pretty pleased with it myself.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson