Taking pictures after dark, by moonlight or streetlighting, is a technique that many photographers have attempted. It involves a tripod-mounted camera with the shutter left open until enough light has reached the film to create a properly exposed negative. Even with today's fast films, exposures can be many minutes long, especially for pictures created by moonlight alone. (Comparable principles apply to digital photography, with low ISO-equivalent sensitivity recommended to limit noise). Many problems beset the night worker, such as:
• Reciprocity failure. An exposure adjustment which is needed with film exposures longer than one second. The correction is exponential, i.e. the longer the duration of the original exposure, the greater the correction needed.
• Flare. Stray light from streetlights included within the frame can seriously degrade image quality. Strong light sources just out of the image area can also cause flare, but can be eliminated by shading the lens.
• Casts. Odd colour shifts caused by using colour film under mixed lighting, combined with long exposures, which in themselves can cause different colour effects. This can either be frustrating or exciting, depending on the type of image expected.
• Movement. Long night exposures cause moving objects to record as streaks or lines. This can be a nuisance, or can be used to good effect, for instance when photographing the movement of stars or traffic.
One photographer's problem is another's creative opportunity; there are no absolute rules. While the camera shutter stays open, foreground objects can be ‘painted’ with flash or torchlight, or slow-synchronized flash can be used to freeze foreground action during long exposures. Night photography requires much time and effort to produce consistently good results. It can, however, impart theatricality and beauty to an otherwise ordinary scene, and many have been seduced by its dramatic possibilities.
Some of the earliest successful night pictures were by Paul Martin in 1896, making 10- to 45-minute exposures along the Thames Embankment. They caused a stir, and his lantern-slide series London by Gaslight won a Royal Photographic Society gold medal; subsequently a Society of Night Photographers was founded in London. Martin's pictures were admired by Alfred Stieglitz, whose wet-street image Night, New York was taken in 1897, and followed by other nocturnes later. Urban night photography blossomed in the 1920s and 1930s, from Josef Sudek in Prague to Berenice Abbott in New York. In Paris, Brassaï demonstrated his painstakingly acquired mastery of haunting nocturnal effects in Paris de nuit (1933). (He timed exposures with cigarettes: a slow-burning Boyard ‘bleu’ or sparkier Gauloise ‘jaune’ according to need.) The dimly lit suburban streets and café windows reflected on wet cobblestones of Marcel Bovis (1904-97) recall the romantic French films of the period. Meanwhile, Bill Brandt published A Night in London in 1938, and continued to photograph during the eerie conditions of the wartime blackout. One of the last of the great black-and-white night photographers was O. Winston Link, who between 1955 and 1960 produced a classic body of nocturnal steam-train images.
— Andrew Sanderson
See also fireworks; twilight.Bibliography
- Bauret, G., Marcel Bovis: promenades parisiennes (1996).
- Tucker, A. W., Brassaï. The Eye of Paris (1998).
- Night: Photographs of Magnum Photos (1998).
- Sanderson, A., Night Photography (2001)
