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Not your typical postcard

Today’s photoessay is a series off nightscapes from Prague. I’ve always found night photography requires a bit of an ‘inertial hump’ to get over – especially if you’re out hauling the tripod for some long exposures; there’s an optimum window just after dusk when the sky is a dark blue and not totally black, balancing off with the ambient illumination of the buildings. It means you have to carefully plan your locations and/or route in order to be at the right place at the right time; on top of that, I find the actual shooting window is pretty small – perhaps two hours at best unless you’re living at extreme latitudes in summer.



The world under the bridge

The upshot of this is that whilst the absolute number of images produced tends to be low, productivity tends to be high: you’re shooting less because you’re forced to work slower, but because you’re forced to work slower, you’re thinking more. (And that is one of the reasons a tripod is such a critical piece of equipment.) As with every photographic discipline, it takes a lot of practice to get to the point where one is fairly confident of the outcome; practice and repetition help, but only up to a point especially where there simply may not be that many opportunities. It’s also not that easy to visualise what a 1, 5, 10 minute exposure might look like. I suspect a lot of people never try because they don’t have the patience. But that would be a shame, since the results can be very satisfying indeed…MT

This series was shot with a Nikon D810, 24mm and 45mm PCEs, Zeiss Otus 1.4/85, and the Voigtlander 180/4 APO-Lanthar. Postprocessing using Photoshop Workflow II, of course.



Dancing House I



From the Old Town side



Channeling O’Keefe



Dancing house II



Not much has changed



Dancing house III (time is a continuum)



Roots



Motion in the rain

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