Haarlem By Night

Marco--
Love this whole series. Keep posting them! Out of curiosity, what kind of exposure times are you doing? Do you ever use your own lights or is it all ambient lighting? Again, great stuff!

tjaded said:

Marco--
Love this whole series. Keep posting them! Out of curiosity, what kind of exposure times are you doing? Do you ever use your own lights or is it all ambient lighting? Again, great stuff!

Click to expand...

Exposure times vary a little depending on lighting situation and sometimes a need for smaller apertures. However, since most are wide angle 28-35mm, I tend to shoot around F5.6 / F8. Most of the time, exposure times of 8, 15 or 30 seconds give the right exposure, occasionally 1-4 minutes (film was Kodak TriX 400).

I do bracketing, starting at +1 to at least +3 stops with my Dynax 7 set at the multi-segment reading.

I have recently begun exploring pull developments (N-1, N-2, +/- minus 25 - 40% of development time), the results you also witness here. It makes printing and dealing with the contrast a lot easier, if you have properly overexposed to allow for this zone system trick.

About lighting: no, I do not carry lights. Everything is ambient, but most (historic) towns nowadays have plenty of light, you just need to find the right condition and angle, which actually can be a hard job at times. I search long and hard to find these places and look around continuously.

I realize some of the pictures may look like I used artificial light and softboxes, but that again is just a matter of careful choice of subject and angle to photograph from.

Lastly: there is also quite a bit of work in the darkroom for all of these pictures. Although the pull development allows for easier printing, I still need to balance out the overall prints using dodging and burning during printing.

Very nice picture here like it very much!

Cheers Armin

Beautiful at night, with snow on!