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Night Photography: No Light? No Problem!

night photography. No lights, No problem with Matt Hill. Matt, come on up. Good to have you back here. Seems like it's been a while. All right, now let's get to it. Thank you so much. Hi, everybody. Good to see you. Now we get to talk about the artistic side. Something near and dear to my heart. Night photography. You heard a little bit about my origin story right before the break. I love shooting at night. I don't Part of it might be that I have a day job. Part of it might be that I actually just love expanding time. That's really what I like doing. So I have a thesis that anyone could take a photo during the daylight. It's true. You can pick up a camera and you could take a picture. This is not saying making a photograph, just taking a photograph. But it takes a special kind of crazy to take pictures at night. And I am that special kind of crazy. So here is some of us doing what we love taking pictures. You often find us congregating around places where their stars or water and you s...

ee many tripods. Many light sources. This is out in the Valley of Fire. What really got me into it? Is that time and visuals. Equal fund. May I find ah lot of fun in this? I wouldn't do it if it didn't stimulate me. This is not for commerce. It does sell. But this is because it satisfies me. I wanted to share a lot of the stuff that I do with you. If you're interested in night photography, I'm gonna give you the basics. I want to show you how to get started. So talk about why the gear how to get a game, ambient exposure. And then we're gonna go through a whole bunch of ways that you can experiment with time. That a whole bunch of ways you can experiment with light and talking about mistakes and then synthesis. Synthesis is an overused word again, but I think that it's it's really good in this case. So I believe in making photographs. I'm very deliberate. I was taught silver photography. Uh, I did all of my own processing, Uh, when? When I taught myself photography. I was an exchange student in Denmark. I lived there for a year. I skipped classes because they gave me a key to the dark room and its many chemicals, as I could use. So I bought 200 feet of Ilford FP five hand rolled my own film, processed it and printed it. So I processed 200 feet of black and white film. How much film that is? It's a lot. So I I did ah lot of that. And this, in fact, is a film shot. I've only shot this two years ago. I'm still using film. Film is great for night photography, but I really love making my part of my process of learning. Photography was understanding how to get it all in camera, So I am from that point of view, I I understand digital tools. I can use them, but I prefer to make everything inside of one exposure. And when you see all of these, unless I say otherwise, it's all one exposure like this. This is also the Valley of Fire is the first time I went out there, and luckily I had one of my dear friends since first time meeting. The guy named Sylvester also lives in Queens, New York, right outside of the Valley of fire. I don't know why, but there's a fireworks store, but they have a sign that says You're not allowed to bring fireworks and we didn't do this is somebody else's picture. I'm just getting my picture The A sparkler on a wire and stood inside of it and made a huge globe, and he just kept spinning. And this is an eight minute exposure. You could tell by the star trails. So and then. So there's one light source year plus time, plus a flash with a red gel to emphasize the red rocks there. So there's a couple of pops with a flash with the red gel. What did we do? We had a lot of fun way weren't like saying, Oh, we got to get this project done. We were having the time of our lives making this picture. This is in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York They do lamplight towards every year around this time near Halloween, and this is another way to bend time watching people walk around with the lanterns, you know, like but they stopped. Sometimes you can see them. Other times they just keep moving, like looking for those opportunities I like making those opportunities Time delish. What happens? Think about photographers. The origin of the four photograph was actually what I love to dio. The material was so insensitive that it took minutes to make a picture. They had to build chairs with clamps for people's heads so they could sit still for minutes to take a picture. Nowadays, we can take a picture with less than one foot candle and its sharp, and it looks great as a raw file because we can do I s 01 million, you know, like it's awesome, right? The technology has taken us places that we never dreamed over the origins of photography taking pictures in the almost apparent lack off light. But playing with time is another thing. Most pictures that we see throughout our life we think about is an instant. It's about 1/60 their 125th of a second on average, right? We're taking a fraction, and we're representing within a frame. But that fraction lives forever. It's captured, it's frozen. So what happened like persons famous picture with guys about to jump over a puddle, you know, like that's the moment before something happened and we arrested it, but we're still talking about time. We stopped time for a moment. We stopped time forever inside of a frame. But what happens when you can stretch it and pull it and play with it? Instead of saying I'm gonna represent a fraction, I'm gonna represent hours. What can you do with that time? That's where my fascination life. So with the story that I told you guys right before the break I'm telling you that night photography chose me. I chose to go out, make that mistake with my friend, hang out in the graveyard. And as you could tell, I'm still shooting graveyards. I really love it because it's an opportunity to push my technical boundaries when you go out to shoot pictures at night. It's not easy. It really isn't. You don't just set up a tripod and take a picture. You gotta know your way around the camera. There's no like, you got to know which buttons to press, and they don't know how to get a good exposure and then do all of the other stuff. That happens, what was open. So I think that it's very challenging and I grow every time I have to solve a problem, and that's kind of what we are. His photographers. We are problem solvers. We're habitual problem solvers. Aesthetically, you know, we have to make something happen that looks pretty, but we have to solve problems to make it happen, making all these things happen in one frame. We're talking about that. I like to do it in camera. Some people don't. I don't have a judgment. It's just my preference. I like to challenge myself of getting it done. A one. This other thing doesn't happen when you're shooting during the day. Maybe if you're a nature photographer and you're hiking. But just being quiet, you know, when your shutters open, you know it's a four minute exposure. You're either light painting or, you know, what do you do? Enjoy your life for four minutes. Just stare. What's happening? You know, it's a It's a moment to slow down. I've shot a lot of large format photography in my life to very process oriented, so you can say I love doing this and I'm taking a moment to enjoy this creation that is ours and they're going a little nuts and letting Luis is also healthy. This is the experimentation now we saw if you guys saw ignite last night, there's some other people love doing stuff at night. This going a little nuts was represented last night. I love it. This is my kind of people So gearing up my suggestion to you is don't go overboard. Please go minimal first because you have to carry everything. I am notorious for bringing way too much equipment to a shoot. Don't be like me. Save your back and then build it up As you find holes and things that you want to achieve because you're not gonna want to do every single kind of night photography. You're gonna find things that attract you more than others. So find things that serve those purposes for what to use. You can use digital or film. My strong suggestion is that use both Why? Well, one picture can take eight minutes. Why not run three cameras at the same time? When digital to film, all you need is three trap pots, right? Most of us have old film Gammas kicking her out, right? Take him out, brush the dust off. You can triple your productivity by bringing three cameras for digital DSLR are fantastic we're talking about I'd say the mid grade ones. You're gonna wanna look at issue with the D 700. Still, if I felt like moving up to a D 100 I probably would. But I love the DSLR is because of changing the lenses. There's so many lunches to choose from. That's one reason you might want to go with a DSLR mere lis cameras air coming up quick. They're really phenomenal. I know for a fact from my ah friend in shooting partner and co educator gave Biederman. We teach night photography classes together. He uses Fuji X Siri's cameras and he can do one our digital exposures without noise, which is fine out. You can't do that with the SL ours. The usually Max added on 4 to 8 minutes before you start to get horrible noise. They're just not built for that cause the centers buildup noise as you keep pushing energy through. So the mirror lists don't have that problem. Especially the food you want. I would check on the others. Point shoots. Absolutely not. I don't even think about it. So you want to have raw capability. You want to have an Elektronik cable release. Bring two or three spare batteries because holding your showed or open draws energy constantly and your exposure times your roughly. Let's use the finger in the wind about 1 to 8 minutes, and this all depends on whether the moon's out. What your aperture is, what you're eso is lots of factors film I love because it can handle the extremely long exposures really well. And it's that thing to do that after you've turned on your digital shot, you turn to your film camera and be like crank open again and then you've got another shot burning. I love film shots for water, especially because when you get beyond eight minutes with water, it just turns into this beautiful, velvety something. You know, it just it takes on depth, but in a very soft way. With digital, you can stack, but stacking and Photoshop doesn't do the same thing. Is having one exposure of time and movement, you know, because you're compositing two things of those. So I highly recommend using film if you like soft water, because I go for 16 minutes, 30 minute to our exposures with that. If you like star trails that are huge, use film because you can just open it and leave it open from dusk till dawn. And you're fine. You know, like it's if especially if you have a fully mechanical film camera, you'll never run out of batteries. You just open the shutter. So medium. All formats are great. Of course. The larger your format, the more detail you're going to get. But the more processes involved, the heavier the camera, the stranger, the lenses. And you must have again the equivalent of this. A mechanical cable release. Otherwise, you can use gaffer's tape to hold the the shutter open, which I have to do with my Loma extra batteries. If you have an electronic shutter like I use Mumia seven, it holds the shutter open electronically, so you got to keep extra batteries. Can't tell you how many times have gotten a spare battery from Gabe for my mommy and seven on exposure times 20 to 60 minutes. I mean, you could do the shorter exposures, but there's this thing called reciprocity failure. With film like with digital, the exposure's exposure, the inverse square law works double the exposures twice the exposure with film. Every film has a different reciprocity failure characteristic, which means if you double the time, it's not necessarily double the exposure. You might have to triple the time to get double the exposure, depending on which film you're using. So I generally do everything in black and white have shown you guys a couple of color things. But, uh, Fuji at Gross is phenomenal, for if you like straight, black and white. And if you want to use something that's a chroma Jannik film, let's see. 41 Process. I Love Ilford XP two have been shooting it for over 20 years. Is fantastic a shooting at ESO 200 instead of 400? That's one stopover exposure, but it holds the highlights really well. It's beautiful. Show will be on other gear. You must must unequivocably, have a good tripod and a good head. Do not cheap out here by something that is steady, because if you have something on a tripod for eight minutes and it shakes a little bit, you wasted eight minutes. Your life get a great trap out in a great head. I prefer a three way her five way heads instead of ball heads. This is all up to taste. But I'll tell you why. Because if I want to move my camera forward a little bit, I just want access at a time. You know, if I want to move it sideways, I'm going like this with a bullhead. When you let go of it, everything can move at the same time. So if you want to be very particular about what you're doing at night, I would suggest looking into something where you can adjust one axis at a time usually called a pan tilt head. The one that I use and full disclaimer. And I worked for the company to in my day job, and Euro was called the P H. Q head is a five way ahead and has see if I can demonstrate this. I didn't bring her with me. Um, I have a 14 to 24 lens on an Nikon, and when I go vertical, you put the camera like this and you turn it vertical and now you can turn it like this. So the lenses here, right. I have a panorama on the bottom of the camera, not just on the bottom of the head, which turns this way. But there's one underneath the camera. So when I go vertical, I can turn the camera opened down like this. Not all heads have this and some of them you can get a pen plate to put underneath your quick release. You can do that as a substitute, but it's all built into the head now. L E d flashlights. I would say Get two or three different brightness. Is one very dim for working close. You don't want to blind yourself. Uh, that's around 20 to 40 lumens very cheap. That's like the key chain led is 90. Lumens is a good place to start for late painting. Ah, and 200 lumens is for painting something very far away or scaring off people. There's there's some great tactical flashlights now that are up to, like, 500 lumens, and you can really hurt somebody's eyes with those. But you can also paint things that are very distant. So these were the three levels that I'd suggest getting. It also suggests getting is it in here? I would get some tungsten flashlights to the yellowish looking ones because they're warmer and we're gonna talk about white balances later. But led Zehr generally war like very cool. They're very white or blue. If you set the daylight balance, you can always gel them. That, like, if you get the little Roscoe Stack, put it over top. Other stuff. Always bring Gaff. Tape is you're gonna need it. Um, always bring water more than you think because you're out there sometimes in a remote place and you need to stay hydrated. I care about your safety. Bring a stopwatch. I use the one that's on my phone because if you're doing a film exposure, you need the time it somehow speed lights are awesome. Sparklers are awesome. Other fun light sources Anything you think of late modifiers for those light sources and gentles. Um oh, I should update this slide. I glance. Comic wrote a fantastic book on night photography call finding your way in the dark. I highly recommend it. Ah, he's He's a fantastic educator is one of the original. He is a student of the first guy to ever teach night photography at a college level, so he's been teaching for 20 years. He really knows what he's talking about. And he wrote, in my opinion, with the best books so far. My co teacher and friend Gabriel Biederman has a new book coming out in October on night photography. Also, uh, I'll find the Lincoln put it up. It's for pre selling Amazon, so I haven't read it yet, but knowing gave, it's gonna be awesome. So this is my gear stuff that we talked about to be more specific. I used D 787,000 is a backup full frame, not full frame. My primary lenses. Air 14 to 24. I love the 51 4 Challenging yourself with shooting primes is a good thing. I like the one forecast. Sometimes shooting wide open is different. If everybody shooting at F eight at night, what can you to be different? Kind of like my ASIO presentation. What can you do to look different? Shoot it 14 So what happens? Maybe put some neutral density, and from it, let me have seven to have three lenders. My 43 when my favorite lenses on earth, it's just like one of the sharpest wide angle lenses in medium format. Love that low mo put out this six by 12 camera for about 200 bucks called the Bel Air. It's a folding six by 12 with interchangeable lenses. It's awesome. You'll never find a six by 12 camera that inexpensive. If you want to shoot panoramic format film on medium format, try one of those. They're awesome. Let's have a four by five pinhole camera, which, if you set up one of those, you're gonna shoot all night. One exposure. You're committing one sheet of film the all night, and I bring a four by five as much as possible with me. This one happens to collapse very, very small. Ah, and a general shoot with 1 my tripod CT to 14. These air for the people that really want to know what I use. Um, the P H Q head I talked about. I use a really right stuff plate because it has a ledge on the back of it. This is important to me, like the camera sits here and there's a ledge. And then when I do what I talked about, where I put my 14 to 24 I go vertical, the camera doesn't creep because there's a ledge on the back of it, so the camera won't spin. So if you if you want something, if you have heavy lenses and you're going to go vertical, this is an essential piece of gear. I have Elektronik cable. This is actually more than the Nikon. Wanna have an off brand one? Also, which is great. The thing you need to know about these is if you want to start trails that air stacked, you have to have one second or less in between the exposures or else you have gaps between the stars. Make sure you check the reviews first that it does that people will tell you the other night. Photographers will say which ones that are available for sale. Do and do not do that for my I have a second and third and fourth tripod, depending on how many cameras me. Photo makes tiny tripods. It's just really small for plastic cameras, like the low mow or the me A seven, which is very light. Ah, small tripod with the ball head is perfect. You don't need to have a monster tripod for your smaller film cameras, so don't pack the extra weight if you don't need the technical abilities of those tripods. I also use a travel angel. I bring a light meter. Not because it can read the Gambia, but because I use a lot of flash at night. Um, I have one SB 900. I have to loom. Oh, pros. And I bring a beauty dish and a high power reflector with a grid. Sometimes I'm crazy about lighting. I'm crazy in general, uh, temper rolling case, which both roles, and it turns into a backpack. Fantastic case of a lot of pocket wizards. I do make my own light shape or sometimes out of paper, because I like different effects. And when you blow light through what looks like white paper the Bristol, it's actually really warm. So if you want to add a warm light source into a daylight white balance, it looks really cool. I highly suggest making on light shippers just to see what it does, uh, fireworks and stuff. And I use a color checker passport because when you get back, it's nice to know that you've got all the colors represented, and you need to find new troller, blah, blah, blah. So it's just one of those things. It's like breathing. Just do it. My post production stuff. I have a MacBook Pro. I do color Manage Love, Nick Silver Effects Pro I Love Black and Nick Silver Effects and this is I'm no way affiliated with them whatsoever. Just saying this from the heart. They make me feel like what black and white should have been if I were a better dark room technician. You know, like I can make my black and whites look like my dreams did back when Digital wasn't available, so I just I love silver effects makes me happy. Dxl is great for taking images like with extra wide angle lenses and popping them back into rectilinear space. So if you want a pre process your images, the XO is awesome for that. And for my printing, I have a one for my printer, and I used Gilford's cold fiber silicon called mono silk. Is that my my favorite paper traces. So I do sell prints and they just they look great. Yes, I had a quick question about the camera that you use, and I've used both Nikon and on canon cameras, and I know there's a little bit of debate about how each handles on that photography, especially I also on different sensors. Is there a reason why you prefer the camera that you do vs other brands of camera? When I made my decision was just m probably going on five years ago. I mean, he's my D 700 for a while. Uh, it had the finest long exposure raw files. Things have bounced around since then. I would say Rent it and try it. You know, like if you have, everybody has different tastes. You know, the things that I would look for and trying something like that is how much noise happens in areas of continuous tone. That's really what you're looking for when we get into how to start shooting, going to talk about what I have SOS to shoot at. Uh, my most important thing is quality of the raw file. So ends. If I could shoot longer and still get a raw file, I would go for that magic, which is why I'm considering of Fuji X one now because it has interchangeable lenses, but it allows for that one hour exposure with no noise. So I'm looking forward to trying it out. I have friends that have showed me their files, and I was blown away. So your criteria is most important And what the file looks like. Question. Can you speak to specific techniques for night photography, like flagging and lens cutups or do plans? Yeah, I think I'll cover more of that stuff a little bit later. Um, as we get into other techniques, I'm gonna hit the basic stuff first. And then we'll talk about other crazy things you could do after you nailed the basics. So, um, I will answer that as much as I can, and if I haven't asked me again. So this is just some behind the scenes snapshots of me in the field of my Low Mohan. I mean, me photo my VX 1 25 on my enduro at Bannerman Island. Um, I think the picture from that one is actually in this presentation, so gear is essential. You know, being comfortable through here is also essential. I don't know a lot of people who would feel comfortable operating a four by five camera in the absence of light. You know, So getting to know your gear is very important and you should just practice with the lights off. Can I change the white balance? Can I change the I S o Do I know how to make the display light up? Don't turn the camera on and off can change lenses Can I turn the focus from auto to manual? These are the things your hands have to know how to do without turning a light on. You can bring a little light with you, but it's better if you don't keep turning out on off of your eyes. Stay adjusted to the darkness. It's very good for you in your acuity and understand the composition of what's in front of. So let's talk about step one. How do you get a correct ambient exposure? I'm going to suggest that you set your white bounced tungsten set your quality to raw and such a isso to the lowest native I. So that means the smallest number on my Nikon is 200. Most cannons is 100. So that we're just going to say, is your your basic starting. If you set your white balance to daylight, your skies air probably gonna look orange if you look live near any sort of metropolis. If you said it, the tungsten, this guy's gonna go more blue. They look more like that cool sort of night scene that we're used to seeing auto focus. What you do is you set up your camera with the auto focus on shine your flashlight on the thing that you must be focused on your high powered flashlight half press. Wait for that focus. Confirmation the deep in the little green circle on the bottom left hand corner. Let go and then flip your lens from auto focused Emmanuel without touching it. When you do that, you won't have to change focus again ever unless you turn your camera bump, the lens or the thing that you focused on decides to run away. So that part takes some getting used to. You know, they the theory part right now it's like, Oh, yeah, I got that. But that's the biggest struggle, actually, is like when you set up your tribe. I did. You compose and then you get that focus. Once you make that normal, night photography becomes a lot easier. So if you're using something like a film camera where you can see the range for focus on the lens range. Focusing is awesome. I do with my money to seven all the time. So if I said it to F eight, I put infinity on the right hand side of FAA. And I know from infinity to that number of feats and focus, just make sure I'm in the right distance. So it's called Range Focus and then performing a high I eso exposure test is next. We're going to actually change the I S O. So choosing an aperture is part of the next thing. Um, knowing your depth of field is important. If you want to have a little bit and focus, choose something shallow. Most of the time you start around 56 or eight. Don't go to the smallest aperture on your lens for two reasons. One, it's gonna make your exposure really long. And number two is when the whole gets that small. The reflection of the late off of the aperture blades actually makes the image softer, so if you want a really sharp image, it's not. Your smallest aperture is usually a stop or two more open from that So 56 DF 11 is probably the sweet spot on most lenses. So once you pick that on a full moon night, FAA, it's probably good less than full moon. 56 If you have a new moon, you're gonna be waiting for a while because there's no light bouncing off of the moon. Um, said she shutter speed to one second and set your eyes. So six stops above your native on my Nikon. That was high one point. Oh, on if you have 6400 that's really equivalent. So this is from 200 to the top is high one point. No, but if you count the stops, its six stops of light. So you set that up. You taken exposure at that one second. If it looks great, if it looks great, that one second exposure is one minute you're needed device so you could go up on a chalkboard and do the six stop math. But if you jump all the way back down from from one second, double it doublet doublet that what they let you get the one minute? So every second at six stops above your native Aiso is one minute at your native I S 01 2nd is one minute, two seconds, two minutes three seconds is three minutes is pretty easy. It's pretty awesome. Actually, Before this, this is actually revolutionary. Before this, it was trial and error. We were crazy. In the days of film, we were crazy. We went out not knowing anything about the exposure. There was reciprocity, failure and experience. And I hope I'm going to get it. You know that that was what you got. A light meter cannot see this dark, but with your high Aiso test, you can know with absolute clarity if you got a good exposure. So if it looks good, you also want to check the hissed. A graham hissed. A gram tells you how much information from black to white is in your photograph. If everything's crammed to the left, it's very dark. If you see like not a lot of information on the right hand side, you want to increase the exposure until it's mostly in the middle. And what you do that you're in a good place. Take that number of seconds. Set your camera to bulb, use your electronic timer, set the minutes that were seconds before and set your eyes so back down to native and then hit. Go and sit back and say, I got this because when it's done, it's gonna look just like the highest so test except with the highest quality that your camera can produce. This is revolutionary. It's awesome. You could get a perfect exposure. Now what do you do from here? Make more pictures once. If you are in the same place and you turn your camera and basically the same light, it's hitting the thing that you just made a perfect exposure of. You don't need to do another test. Just use the same exposure. If the moon goes behind the clouds, you're gonna need to change your exposure. The moon comes out from the clouds, you need to change your exposure. But remember, everything is just inverse square law, double the amount of time or have the amount of time. So if you do four minutes, what's the next exposure up from that eight minutes. So you're gonna find a sweet spot where you doing this and your tolerance for time. So if you say all right, I really want to do this at F 11 you find out that That's a 16 minute exposure. You're gonna need to think of two things. One is Is there going to be too much noise in that for my DSLR or merely camera mailers? Camera? No film camera? No DSLR, probably. I also you got to think about the temperature. We're gonna talk about that too. But this is your highest out of test. I would jump too far ahead. Once you master this, you can start doing all the experiments that you want. Temperature is very, very important. We love the winter ours night photographers. Why do we love it? Because digital sensors love coolness. They don't like heat. The more heat there is, the more noise there is. So if you're shooting and dead summer, you'll be lucky to get a one or two minute exposure shooting in winter. You can get up to, like eight minutes, 10 minutes. So you should know the ambient temperature and make notes. You'll say, All right. I took a picture. I went and I looked at it 100% on my screen in your editor of choice. I used light room and I saw noise or I didn't see noise, you know, and you're gonna look for colored specks like that. I see green, red and white specks all over, and blue specs, too. If you see those, you're getting color noise. So no, Like I said, the Mirrlees cameras, they're sort of an expert, an exception. And so his film. But there's still good reasons to use BSL ours, especially that that brought choice of lenses. There's so many things to choose from. What's next? Practice, practice, practice. Get out there and and get used to this process. Focus said it. The manual set your white balance. Take your high. So take your first and exposure get used to that process because that is the first thing you're gonna dio before you do anything else. If you do anything else, you're making it too complicated to start with. Simple. Once you can nail this, you can. Almost after about a year, you can walk into a situation, say I've shot a full moon and a location similar to this before. I'm gonna guess that this is four minutes of that fate and you're gonna be right because you've practiced. Let's talk about experimenting with time. This is half of the equation This is one of my very favorite pictures I've taken. This is the transfer station on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River. The other side of this is New Jersey. They used to float train cars across to this and put him on tracks. And they want across Manhattan. This is for gotten and all these peers down here, they're just sort of nestle around here. Trump towers here and its Westside Highway this year. And that is Riverside Park down here. My friend Gabe, This is my first shoot with him. He's my We teach night photography together. Over five years ago we went to this place is our first night photography shoot. And this is with film with mamma Mia 7 43 millimeters. I shot on XP two, which is a 400 speed film, but I shooted it 200. It was an overcast night. Most of the time you like everything is gray shoot pictures. It's gray, but it actually makes for a nice smoothness of top. So where you gonna look to get your expression of how time is passing in the water? Deep really doesn't like shooting at 16 minutes back then, you know, if he does Men multiple our shooting now, but, um, 60 minutes at F 11 gave me this beautiful shadow on velvety water. I this This is my favorite part right here of the whole picture. It tells this beautiful story of how the absence of light plays with time and motion of a solid object. It is beautiful, it's and then you see this really bright city that looks like sparkly behind it in modern. And this for gotten analog method of moving stuff. It's just for gotten just pushed out. And I think it's a beautiful, quiet moment in one of those things that you can explore during night photography. But it happened during 16 minutes, and I chose to do 16 minutes. I was like, I knew that the right exposure for my digital with some around six minutes. I'm like, I'm gonna let this one burn and that's what I did was like, I know that something magical is gonna happen, but I don't know what it iss took a chance. I love this picture. Still, my favorite picture was the reflections are amazing. That they're so sharp for a 16 minute water reflect I mean, that's amazing. The light source never moved right. This is one of the things you get to notice as your as you do more night photography cars move, so they're going to create soft shadows. The street lights never move. So even though the water was going up and down here, actually the thoughts and river is a title estuary all the way up to like, I don't know, for 40 50 miles, actually, the ocean pushes the Hudson River up. When the tide comes in, it flows north, but it goes out flow south. So it could have been flowing up at this point. And you see all of this happening. But even though is going up and down, it stayed sharp on that softness. Look for those moments when choosing a location like this. Are you Are you planning this spot for the features of the spot or you planning for not being in path of planes and things like that? And if so, what kind of tools they're using to find that information? Wow, that's a great question. I'm not big on planning. Way got lucky because that's JFK and that's LaGuardia. So there's their active. There are two and most of the flight paths or close to here, that I think that what happened that night, it was the cloud cover is so low that the planes were above it. So we lucked out. Um, when I when I'm choosing a location, it's the inspiration is in the composition. I always look for something that tells the story of time, like, how can I do that? And if it's not there, how can I manufacture that story with light or making something move or something like that? So in this case, I saw that there was at least three stops of difference between this and that. And the proper exposure was for this at around six minutes, you know, like that isn't really three stops, you know, 6 to 16. But I knew that this was gonna be much brighter than that when I chose to expose for this. So I wanted this to be the story. So I chose the exposure for this part on. And I knew that I was going to get something in here, but didn't know what it waas. And ever since this picture five plus years ago, I have been looking for opportunities for those shadows on the water. Is this one of my favorite things? The same light sources and shadows cast across the water. I came back earlier this year and I reshot so 216 minutes off 11 116 minutes at F in silver effects, a little bit of structure, so it looks a little bit sharper, but I didn't get the same softness. You see the water patterns. A lot of this has to do with luck to some got soft in here and some didn't out here, so I didn't look out with the wind. There was less wind here than there was there. So you gotta learn to take what you get in night photography to you. Just you can't make certain things happen. But any of the 14 millimeters was going to be different than 43. This is a close into a 21 and that's a 14. So I got Maurin there and I wanted to see if I could tell the same story with Digital, and I didn't Thistle is this is more mystical to May. This is still beautiful in a way, but it's not the same picture. Can I ask a question about your work? For you have used light room and they also use silver silver fact silver effects. Um, hot honey work between the two. Do you export from as a certain file and then imported into silver effects? Is that how you usually work? Yeah, I import everything raw into light room. It's my catalogue management software. And I do late editing in there. I got bad at cleaning my lenses and sensor. So I do my spotting in light room and what I've done with, like, just minor things. Like, if I was off by 1/3 of a stop, I pull it there, Um, maybe a touch of clarity. And then I export to solar effects on. I have probably 18 or 20 silver effects presets that have built over the years, and I flipped through all of those. And if I don't like any of those, I take one and tweak it and save it as a new preset, and that round trips back in as a tiff. So I have the original raw file, and then I have a copy with light room adjustments as a tiff. Eso If I wanted to go back and re process that I could never destroyed the original. Yeah. Uh, so again, this I wanted to Then say All right, if this is this story, this is two minutes at FAA. How could I was trying to recreate that story just because I remember that picture so fondly? Like, alright, 14 millimeters. I remember this being ghostly and this being tangible. So now I got this. I got this being ghostly and this tangible again. But again, it's not really the same thing, but two minutes at f 8 16 minutes that have 13. So there's a little bit more sharpness down here is going to afford. So coming around the other side of it, here's four minutes. See what happens. There was like a telephone pole floating on the water and some water moving around here. Something Steve Region Sharp. Something's moved telling a story passage of time, looking for those opportunities and of course, not a fully great night. Yet radial movement on the clouds. They're coming in like that that shows movement in time to somebody sees a picture that they're like, Oh, cool, wait. There's something going on here. Time happened. That's the moment I look for. This is a film shot, The low mow six minutes It F 16 and I turned the camera, went click, click, click a couple of times, and I got these like, there's a Duane Reade sign again. You know, like that Car's moving through, lights moving. It's a little chaotic. There's some stillness and there's some movement. This is near Red Rock, Nevada. Ah, three shots just trip. Pick together. All of them. Two minutes at four. I used the 105 lens. The degrees of change are always constant by time. But the longer the lens, the longer the lines will be. The longer the exposure, the longer the lands will be. So if use a longer lens like a 1052 minutes is gonna look longer. If I used a 14 these would look like almost like dots it wouldn't be able to see Is much movement because of the apparent. This is one of the first shoots of Bannerman Island. I was in the wrong place. I was doing the lighting for those guys down there. Uh, there two gals there we popped flash on and I hand painted this castle with a flashlight from my position. So for them it looked even more gorgeous because I was often they're down here. I'm appear. I'm off access. I'm creating shadows for me is very flat. I still like the picture a lot, but think about the direction of your light. Also, you do this when you do portraiture like if you do it from your camera, it's always gonna be flattened ugly. And this I think because the castle so interesting it makes the picture interesting. But I wish I had done the late differently. Experimenting with like this is the other end of the island from here, Like this is the north end of Bannerman Island is the south end. Everyone take against. So I did this. I went swimming. I saw that I understand the site. I was like, How did he do that? I was experimenting with an idea that I'm going to use in a later shoot with my night paper project, I put to blow sticks in a white translucent balloon and my swim trunks and I went around. I pulled that balloon underneath the water that was what this is. And then I came back and I went out there and I put Sparkler on a string stood on Iraq. So there's a film exposure, so that was actually fuse. I didn't have any sparklers left. I just had a fuse. So I bowled up fuse and let it. It was very smoky, but it was three AM Nobody's going to yell at me. Yeah, there's 3 a.m. This after a workshop in Sleepy Hollow. This red is one of those headlamps that used for hiking. The low intensity setting is red. I just put it down in the corner and then flash off access. Now the white balance was sent. The tongue sense of the flash looks blue flash in the oil lamp lights, so I have daylight. But the lamplight is warm because it's more tungsten. It's burning something, so it's a yellowish light. It's around 363,200. But the daylight up here now, this one. We tried a whole bunch of different things. We had the red headlamp in here and walking around sparklers. Just experiment and then walking around, plus a tungsten flashlight, which turned up blue And then we're testing out the ice light, which is kind of hard because it's got, um, exactly 180 degrees not covered. See, just so you can either face it forward and have it be a light source in the lens. Or you can face it exactly off camera and make sure that it's always someplace. So you don't get the late source in the lens or you put your body in front of it like that. Question. You're very crisp trees, I noticed in the pictures, and when I've done like night photography in the past, I've had a couple problems with winds every once in a while, and, you know, it's a little blur in the trees. Is that a bit lockers or something you can do to prevent that sort of blurriness and trees? It gets taste. Don't don't shoot on windy nights. I mean, that's this. This I there is a little bit of soft here. You know, this I This was not a windy night for sure. If you like crisp tree is avoid windy nights, it's the best thing I could say. Yeah, I like motion, so I like it when the trees go who you know, like an end. So this is a red headlamp again tungsten flashlight, and this is just like a like same thing for different ways. It's just like you would practice with a portrait subject. Try different ways to flip through and light something up with light sources that show to the lens and light sources that do not show to the lens that illuminate, uh, Christmas lights. You can get Christmas lights that run off a C batteries. That's how people do these globes. Uh, basically, you spend them and to keep your hand inside the axis while you're spinning around the axis like this. That's how you get a perfect globe. I'm horrible with, Um, that's why my globes look like retarded Christmas tree balls. This one is just pulling away. I'm able, and I did this one together. She did it with the Christmas lights, and I was right in front of or behind her with a glow stick. So we actually had two things spinning and pulling away from the camera at the same time to create this vortex effect. And this is just experimenting. There's a mistake you might not see it. But this is something you should always pay attention to, Um, light sources, like, if you have pocket wizards, they have little red lights on them. Um, if you have a headlamp on, be very careful. They're not getting your friends lenses with the headlamp. The back of speed lights have lights on them. So if you're gonna walk into a scene, make sure that the thing that you have, if it has lights on it, obscure them with your body so you don't ruin somebody else's picture, too, because the body systems good shooting with people is always fun. This is out in the desert south of Vegas. There's a fun place to shoot there where you can rent time with some old timey stuff. There's a plane there, too. It looks like it crashed while he was in Waterworld. Um, I found a I found a toy light. There's like a sword with green, like, you know what? I'm gonna play with this. So I used it, you know, like I used it outside the bus. He used the inside the buzz. I also had, um this is just this is daylight, not tungsten. Noticed the orange skies If I had said it the tungsten this guys would be blue But it would have changed the color of this Also, like my flash would have looked very blue instead of the sky So flash over here And I just tried different ways of lighting it up. And this is all gonna be taste and your proclivity for learning lighting. You know, it's a lot of it's like pool you're thinking about angles of late and things reflecting off of them. Diffusion plays into it also. So is your Is your light source constant? Over time? I was restricted on how long I could shoot by how long it took the burn in the green before it became overexposed. So that was the upper limit of my exposure. This is classic portraiture. But the first shot that we did too much light here. Not good for this. Too dark up here. So this was we, uh, you got a Home Depot. Get one of the expanding painter sticks. Then you can get something you screw into the end of it. That's perfect to put letting accessories on it just like a $4 accessory. You take the painters stick out. It's like I'm just gonna step around here for a second. It was up here like that. So and the head of one of the robes newts on it also. So this Newton was off a little bit on that one, but on on this one. So it's really great picture for the person, not too much light on the bottom. There was one extra flash that we dragged across the leaves to pick up the shadows that you see down here to create contrast. If we use just the ambient light, it be soft because most of it's coming from back here from the late from Terry Town, this is again and a sleepy hollow cemetery. This one I was just playing. I was at the end of a shoot, Um, and one of the models, like I got some time. I'm not completely frozen yet. This is in November. I end. Let's do some fun stuff. So I walked around and had a head with a grid on it. You can actually see the ready light there, which I told you, Be careful of that on the pack that I was carrying, but I had the flash. So I walked around different places and pop the flash on her with this grid always keeping the distance from me to her the same so that the exposure from the flash was the same. And the fun part was I had a happy mistake in this one. I got a face in the face. Didn't intend to do that. How could you possibly intentionally do that? Maybe, you know, if if it weren't, you know, 20 degrees in November on Rockaway Beach. So that was just for fun. This was a double flash, but the rest of them single flash arrest the motion. Uh, now we have I like sometimes to put to do flair. So a nice low flash gives ring and then another flash for portrait over here. Just late painting. We're talking about playing with light now. Not time. Some of these have time mixed in. We split. I split these on purpose, so he talked about dilation before. Now we're talking about creative ways of using light as a source or as an addition to the scene. This one I discovered not because I like to rave, but because the ITunes app store genius suggested it to me that there's an app called rave magnet. The changes, the whole screen colors depending on the X Y and Z coordinates and the accelerometer. So I made this picture with my IPad many. It was time, plus another light source. And there's another version here which I like better. This one I allowed at the beginning of the end for the the IPad to face forward. But for the rest of it, I was going like this. I was painting without the IPad facing the lens so the light was blocked and hitting this way. And because it changes chroma as I move it to get all of these different colors. But this is just me being curious. Like what can I Oh, there's an app that costs a dollar that makes colors, and it's a light source. Yeah, I'll play with that. That makes sense. So I look for opportunities with light. Is the lesson that open for that one. Flashlight is one of your best friends. You can do so many things with it. This one. I just set up the camera and walked away every three steps. I turned it on for a second. That said Just book book HDR at night, which there is interesting. There's a lot of people love it. Um, I don't do a lot of hdr, but I decided to get curious. Um and I did this a couple months ago in Get Rich Gantry Park Plaza on Long Island City in Queens. Beautiful, beautiful park. If you've never been there, this is the equivalent, actually of the other thing I showed you earlier. This is the other side of New York and there's another transfer station, but this one is not his decrepit is the other one. It's well maintained with part of a park itself. If you're curious, you can see him up close. But this one I took three shots and made in HDR and I actually liked it. And, General, you see, my my work is is black and white, so hdr for black and white purposes is interesting to me to get expanded tonal range. But I got great detail in the shadows, didn't lose the highlights, and that's a reason to consider it at night because you light sources air finite. You got street lights, you got houselights. You got other stuff if you exposed for the shadows, you're gonna blow those out. So if you really, really want to keep your highlights like this Pepsi sign here, then you might want to take a second shot that is exposed only for that and maybe 1/3 in between. And try HDR. If you like it, use it. If not, I use it for a sense of reality, not for a sense of unreality. So some people like the fantastic aspects of HDR. I prefer toe like this one isn't HDR. I was able to get a good exposure on the group of people and keep the skyline, which will be hard with the single shop, So it's a reason to consider it. I do encourage making mistakes. Like my dad told me this when I was growing up. We grew up in the northern part of New York State. Uh, as he was teaching me to ski said, If you don't fall down, you're not trying hard enough, so I suggest deliberately pushing yourself into areas of discomfort when you're doing this stuff. I was fortunate enough last summer to spend a month in Denver, and I went out to with high, high, high expectations to the great sand dunes that's southern part of the Rockies. In Colorado. It's this beautiful, huge tall dunes right near some mountains in this valley. And they just like all the wind, blows the sand to this one corner. That's the sand dunes that shouldn't be there. They're beautiful. I went there on a new moon. I didn't check. I should have. I always check the moon, but New moon means absolutely no light from the sky. If you're near cities, that's okay, because there's light pollution here. There was a little bit of light pollution from a town that was out there. But you see all this noise, they even though I kept my exposure down toe one minute and this is a stack of like 21 minute 20 comma, one minute exposures still got noise. Couldn't get rid of it. Just it just makes me mad. But I wanted to get this. This was the story. There's a group of about five gals who forgot to come home before dusk, and they had their headlamps and flashlights and they came down off of the dunes, walked just right past me, and I wanted that light trail this like Like I gotta have this. And I knew something was gonna happen because it was so hot. I was in the desert and there is no light, but I did it anyway. I still like it. But if we're talking about, find out quality, the noise is unacceptable. Same thing pointed the other way. I said, All right, I can do this. I can get a long stack of star trails, but I still had the noise problem throughout. I was lucky to get this and I had to pull up detail as I was processing, processing it. But these mountains were really just a shadow. The difference to in the sky in the mountains of so little. If the phases of the moon real quick, you can pretty much you, sonny 16 with its with a full moon, you'll feel like you're shooting in daylight. It's awesome. They're sharp, crisp shadows, and you can make these beautiful pictures as long as there's not a lot of other ambient light around. The moon is an excellent late source moving away from a full moon. It just gets darker and darker. And the new moon complete absence of late on the moon is a great time to do. I'm gonna late everything myself. Kinds of pictures. If you don't want the moon adding that time and decreasing your total exposure time, you want longer exposures. Shoot doing a full moon, but make sure it's not hot and you're using digital fusing film. That's fine. You have a question. Can you speak to how you created this image, particularly how every all of the stars are spending on a single point And then how you would change that process to track of a particular object like the moon across the sun across the sky? OK, two questions and one there. One is where all the stars spinning around a point where you point your camera is very important. If you pointed at the North Star, then all the earth rotates off. Then access are like basically 1/2 of a degree office, so close enough so everything is going to appear to spin around that point. If you point north, if you point east or west, you're gonna get longer star trails. They're going to start to look a little bit like this. I'm using a very wide lens here. So you can kind of see this would be almost due east Almost. Maybe it's east, north, east A little I but you're gonna get longer trails, and it's gonna look like a long, more emotion. And if you point south in the Northern Hemisphere, you're going to see very long star trails. So if you want a lot of motion point South, it's hard for me on the East Coast because if I point south of general got New York City there, and the sky goes like there's a lot of light there. So But in this case, you can get those circular things like that. If you want to track something, yeah, more into Astro photography at that point, and you can just get one of the telescope kits with the motorized tracker. Put in the coordinates of the thing you want to track, attach your camera to it, and it will just follow it. So it's totally possible with money and technology. I wouldn't do it by hand. I don't have a steady enough, and, uh, so this isn't This is a mistake in my mind. I mean, I learned something and talking about planes. Here's one coming through, so I love this picture. This is a crop of a picture. This is a moment when one of my models was very cold. This is one of those November nights, but I love the picture because there's an unguarded moment on the model's face really self water back here that you know it's water. As soon as you see that, when you see that you're like, Oh, that's water, something above that's got to be the rest of the ocean, Something below That's the ocean coming forward. There's some really good things going on with time here, but there's a horizontal line through the models neck, which is a cardinal said. Is that something you don't do? You don't decapitate a model by putting a line through it. So basic photography things apply here. Asking yourself questions is very important. My early experiments Can I take a part of myself at night and stay sharp? Yes, 3200 speed film. That was probably a four second exposure. I stayed steady for it. Can I make a panel camera out of a beer case? Yes, that's me on the ground, by the way, that? I think this is an eight minute exposure. We used a piece of photographic paper as the negative and printed through to another piece to get this positive. So can I make three people appear in one photo using only flash? This is a question I ask myself like in my late teens. Early twenties, Yes. Open shuttered a bulb Used flash like a hammer. Like at that. At that point, I didn't know what a flash meter waas So I had my vivid are and I'm like, I know that it roughly at this distance I'm not going to kill somebody, right? But I'm gonna lose all the features on his face. And I didn't really quite understand everything, but I went behind and I let the wheels up and stuff like that. So I was happy. I did a night picture in a rail yard in Toronto like I'm starting to understand stuff. Ask questions. Enter them by experimenting Now, synthesis is my favorite part. If you have something else you dio this is I believe that everything you do informs everything else you do. If you are particularly skilled, it's something else. You should allow that to infiltrate the other things in your life that you dio allow that to inform your decisions. And I think that synthesis is a word that's overused. But I think it's appropriate in this case, your synthesizing you're putting things together to make something else. I'm also a cut paper artist. 56 years ago, I picked up something I tried in high school on, and I started making this. Maura's an act of taking care of myself. I wanted to do something completely analog. Me and a knife and a piece of paper. No rules, no instructions, just making shapes. And that's why I started doing that. Some like I'm just gonna make shapes because it pleases me. I did it privately. Then I started you on my friends and they're like, Why aren't you showing anybody this really? All right, I start showing people I mean a mask like, Oh, I love this mask is still I used it for a business card for years, and then I sort of like let that drop off him like that was a cool idea. But I picked it up again. Start playing with colors, you know, like black and white a lot, but I played colors and I shot the mermaid parade. I don't know if you guys know that is in Coney Island. Every year, there's a parade that celebrates the opening of the beach for the summer. I shut that for a decade. You know, this is one of my favorite pictures from it. This is Dick Zigun. He's the unofficial mayor of Coney Island and a gentleman on stilts. Uncle Sam and I had this massive collision because this is this this parade that celebrates creativity and art and a lot of people that are creative participate in the parade. And I had this explosion and collision in my head. I had this idea and I was just like, Wow, that, like, Wait, I can't do that. I really can't do that, because that involves things I've never done before. That I got scared. Like I've never asked people to do that kind of stuff. My allowed to do that. How do we even start? I got over and I started. This is what I did last year in Denver. I took my cut paper, I took my night photography and I matched him up together. My question was, Can I dress people in paper fashions during long exposures? That was the question. I asked myself. This was the first answer. Yes, I can do that. And night paper was born. And really, this is around my core beliefs. I want to explore the dilation of time. I like surreal art. The paper fashion tryingto help people think about perceptions of beauty is really like who wears paper Kind of like especially paper. That's like Onley paper. There are only wearing paper. All everybody in the project is a volunteer I really love. That's close to my heart. Everybody wants to be there. Is there because they want to be there? I intend to have more amazing gallery shows. Make a nice coffee, coffee table book, really top notch, actually end new directions as they present themselves. This project is probably gonna take me years. So work through. I've gone through one stage. I've got ideas for the next ones that I'm working through. But a couple of things that I've done this was in a backyard in Brooklyn. These air tests that I made trying to work out the concept I had to build myself a a model out of modeling wire that didn't have one. And then it looked good. It made great shadows but was really confusing. So Amazon has a inflatable models for $14 it sounds strange, but it's inflatable. And then I just started draping. I still have this one. Her name is Sakura and these are the tests that I ran out. I like the shapes. I like the shadows. I like using direct light, un diffused light. You see how white and black positive, negative space that play together. This is my synthesis. This is my working out visual ideas. And then this is a little bit about my process where my cut paper art I don't plan. Even when it comes to the fashion. I have this approach of not planning. I take paper, I start making shapes when they make sense. I encourage that and I guided towards something. Why? What am I thinking of? What I'm doing? This positive and negative space, shadow and light. How is this going to cast a shadow on somebody's body? Where am I gonna put the light? How is this gonna tell a story? How can I make time happen with this? I do. Fittings have people come in the test to make sure that it works with the body type. Uh, and I use the same light that I use on location, very important. And then during the shoot I have This is the picture that shot by my friend Gabe when it's full screen like the credit is there. So I just want the photo credit to go to Gabe. This is me. There's the model. There's Mabel with another light. So I have a pack with ahead here. I use the spotlight for the shot. Ah, here's some of the other masks and stuff that I had just a little behind the scenes to show you what happens. I bring a lot of gear to do this because I like a certain kind of light. And here's some other resulting shots where I'm exploring some form of torch storytelling here, but I don't come to the shoot saying I specifically want you to stand this way. I'm not. I'm not big on that kind of posing. I come looking to create opportunities for the models to relate with what they're wearing and tell a story that is more about them and how they feel about what's happening. And we worked together on that. So this is my grand experiment. This is an hour long exposure on film. Uh, so time dilation, flash paper, art, human body is there's a lot of things the link to think about here, uh, 32nd floor in Manhattan, facing south Just that fascinates me. So this is two weeks after Sandy on Rockaway Beach. This used to be the boardwalk is there are the pillars that held up the boardwalk, gone for 80 blocks in the other direction, but works of man versus nature. We got somebody that's in a near natural state wearing paper used to be alive. There's things to think about here and exploring time and paper and people. This is part of my life. Show that I had earlier this year I did photography during the live show. There will be a video coming out, and I encourage you to make your own mashups. What do you do that get inform other things that you dio? What can you put together? How can you make stuff like that happened in your life with your art and I have one plea. I have very few causes, but this is a cause that's dear to my heart. Light pollution is ugly and wasteful. Please, please, please consider it. There's a website called Dark Sky. That organ. I think that we can save a lot of energy, but we can also have a lot more beauty and night photography to help small things. So check it out if you can lend a hand, are a local voice of support to be wonderful? Um, and a We got time for questions and I hope that I inspired you. And I hope that you go out and make beautiful things. You asked me to bring the point backup of flagging and other types of tech types of advanced techniques. You can speak to those and then a follow up of in my own night photography. I found certain settings, uh, that are on the camera there usually helpful or not helpful, like noise reduction. If you can speak to those types of experiences that degree Gotcha, I'll start from the end, and I'll throw in mirror lock up to Wow, I'm gonna start with long exposure, noise reduction or Lennar as we call it Ellie, and our is usually abbreviation. You find your camera. What happens when you use this mode is that it takes another frame again with the shutter closed at the same duration of time to find the hot pixels and eliminate them. So if you have a four minute exposure, the first picture if you turn on long exposure, not six reduction, it will take a four minute exposure and then take a 2nd 1 But the shutter closed, looking for hot pixels and subtract them. You're decrease your productivity by doing that, but you could increase your quality if you're experiencing noise. Generally the circles that I run with, we use that for our last shot before moving on to the next location or for the night. Um, the quality is of such that is generally okay not to use it. I prefer to be more productive. A night of night photography is already not productive anyway, because if you walk out with 10 shots, you had a great night. 20th. Phenomenal. If you're gonna cut 10 down to five, was it really worth it for the quality bump? That's a personal decision going to the lighting. This is Ah ah, lifelong study of what to do with light. Um, my first shot, this shot I used to model lights and I made four foot long snow. It's out of paper because I wanted late that was coming from one direction would cause very sharp shadows. I had no reason to flag because it was Onley coming through Tubas bigas the head. But that tube was this long so and they're on either side. They create this beautiful light dark effect. I think that being deliberate with your late is very important. And if you choose to use a soft box, you you should know that you're going to send diffused light everywhere and you're basically giving up control that plant to gain softness your obliterating shadows by diffusing light. I prefer hard light more because it defines rather than erases eradicates. So if I I am definitely in favour of flagging stuff if you need to, how much grip can you bring, or how many assistance can you con into coming with you? Uh, being in control of light is something I support wholeheartedly. So if you see something that's not going on with light that you like, take care of it like a flagging it off with something is very good grids. I love them, too. If you've never used the late with a great on the front right one. Try it. Because then the late that did spread to this many degrees turns into that many degrees and you'll see that the shadows get even stronger. But its character. So if you're shooting trees, they don't care. Their bark is bark. You know. People are different. People are touchy about skin, so it should look beautiful in the eye of the beholder. And your question was about your I used to always do mere lock up. And then I did tests, and I see no discernible difference with modern equipment that's speaking about SLR. So in medium format, I absolutely do use mirror lock up, and I usually that mere lock up me and sending your mirror up first and waiting for the vibrations that die down and then opening a shorter, whether it's in front of the lens or behind the lens. If I were using like, um, er ze, I would use mirror lock up because that mirrors this big when it goes up, the whole camera vibrates in for a little while. Then you wait for it to stop. And then he opened the lens. So whatever gives you the most sharpness at the quality that you desire is the right thing. And testing is important. So I my, my level of acceptable might not be yours because you might be making seven footprints. I'll make four footprints. I'm never going to make a seven foot print, you know? So, uh, cool. Any other question? Oh, absolutely. Pro photographer wanted to know. Do you ever handhold and move the camera for creative effect during long exposures? Yes. In fact, I dio, um, for for an advertising shoot for Sleepy Hollow a couple of years ago, I followed three lantern tours around for two hours and to get the feeling of what it's like, t give them some more photographs they've never seen before. I actually had my exposure release in my hands, and I had my camera and I was using it like a steady camp, and I was using my thumb to trigger the camera, and I was following people like this s I was I was walking with everybody and trying to get part of them static and the rest of everything moving by trying to steady cam it with this fat a Steadicam, we would have been better, but try fied and elbows cool. Thank you very much. So Creative Spark wanted to know. How do you erase yourself from the shots, and how much touch up do you dio afterwards? If no light is hitting you while you're in front of the lens, you'll never be recorded. If you wear black, you'll never be recorded. If somebody fires a flash on you, you'll be in the lens. You'll be in the frame and record it if you want to erase yourself. It's just minor retouching in here, your tool of choice. Afterwards, you know, Clone Tool, he'll tool. Take another picture of the same thing. That's another option is if you know you made a mistake like that. Take another picture without you in it. And then you can copy that part on to that place in the photograph and replace it. Cool. Thank you, Um, and actually another good one from pro photographer. Do you ever need to get permits for any of your night? photography so far, No Nice and John Son Kiss asked, Do you scan your film in images and then work on them Did digitally? Yes, most definitely. I I sometimes use animate con when it's a really important picture. Uh, when I just want to see whether the exposure was as awesome as I wanted to be ill used like an absent perfection be 700. Some like that, uh, and if I discover something I really love, then I'll rent time on Imus in my Khan and got a really good skin. Awesome. And, um, last I think the last question before we go to break Can you tell us a little bit? You know what's next for Matt And you? Can you tell us a little bit more about your goals for your night paper work? Next is I have some pretty clear ideas about where the night paper project's gonna go be working with couples, uh, and real couples, people who have a relationship with each other on dressing them in paper, together with fashions that relate to each other and then exploring their relationship with each other as their dressed abnormally Onley in paper for long exposures and seeing what stories we can tell with that. And I have some other crazy ideas waiting in the wings beyond that in to finish the edit on the film that we made of the paper burlesque show. I make that available for people to see who couldn't attend because only about 100 people could fit in that. So it was a crazy night. Fantastic. All right, Matt, tell us how we can find you my favorite places. Matt Hill art dot com. You can see all of the art that I make their all of my social links at the bottom of the page. But again, I'm on Twitter. Methyl facebook. Matt dot hill instagram Matal art. Uh, I'm there to speak to and share, so come find me and we can have discussions. All right, Well, thank you very much for night photography. All right, you guys