Dazecoop – Blog of David Cooper – Photography, Videography, Drifting & modifying cars

For a few weeks now, a night photography Flickr meeting had been arranged with a few of us. Meeting at Lee-on-Solent, near Fareham, and going to some random half-derelict quarry place. Not entirely sure where we went to be honest, but it was good.

I really wanted to experiment with some dynamic night lighting that I’ve seen and been inspired so much from Lost America (and his website). This is really the first time I’ve been out with my flashgun and my coloured gels, so I was entirely new to this and didn’t have much experience at all.

I took this "normal" night shot of the quarry, which I used a very slight amount of HDR processing to bring out the detail a little.

Round the back of this place I found this nice wall with one lit-side, one dark, and two perfectly positioned tyres just asking to be coloured. After a couple of goes, it came out pretty well I thought.

We continued through this quarry to find a true derelict building around the back of the complex. An awesome place to experiment with the coloured gels and the flash since there were no other lights to interrupt.

That’s one of my favourites.

One of the guys that came along, Dan, had a Peleng 8mm Fisheye lens which I just had to have a play with. Funny enough, this is a lens I was very interested in getting a while back. Its an old design and doesn’t have any electrical connections on it, so aperture and focus is totally manual. A bit of a task to get right, and even worse in pitch black!

Finally we all lined up and took a long exposure of this building. I wanted to get some star movement in the shot too, but didn’t have the patience (or warmth!) to stay there for very long.

A great night out, and for me, quite successful. The flashgun and coloured gels technique is something that I’ve wanted to try for a while now, but never managed to get out there and try it. I’m pleased.