Photograph: Moonlit Stairway, Wall, and Window

Moonlit Stairway, Wall, and Window

Posted on 08 March 2010

Moonlit Stairway, Wall, and Window

Night photography of a moonlit stairway, wall, and window at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.

Compared to most of my night photography, especially the work from Mare Island, this photograph has, I think, more of a noir quality. This photograph was made in extremely dark conditions at the bottom of a dark stairway next to a dark building in a dark corner of the historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard using only moonlight. Oh, did I mention that it was very dark? :-)

Making this a bit more of a technical challenge, in order to get the composition I had in mind (more or less, since it was impossible to really see the scene fully) I needed to shoot from a position very close to the bottom of the stairway and close to the window at lower right. Since I didn’t want to lose sharpness on the far section of the wall that is lit by moonlight I had to use a small aperture of f/16. But in order to maintain image quality I didn’t want to raise the ISO too far.Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place! So the exposure ended up being very close to eleven minutes long, and even this was barely long enough. (And, using the camera’s long-exposure noise reduction, this meant waiting around for well over 20 minutes to expose the shot and then do the follow-up dark frame exposure. For obvious reasons, I only made one shot of this subject!)

This is going to be a challenging photograph to print! I think that it really needs to go all the way to black in portions of the lower left, but I’ll need to keep at least a small amount of near-black detail – and I’ll have to do a bit of work to figure out how to best print to get the right color/detail in the shadow at the upper right.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Technical Data:
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM
ISO 200, f/16, 645 seconds (that’s not a typo!)

keywords: moon, light, moonlit, night, photography, nocturnes, minsy, mare, island, naval, shipyard, historic, vallejo, california, usa, north america, architecture, structure, noir, railing, door, panel, stairs, stairway, steps, pole, shadow, glow, urban, industrial, window, door, reflection, stock