For Color Intensity, Try Night Photography

Much of the art of color photography boils down to the search for intense color. Often times the search can turn into a quest and in extreme cases the quest becomes like the search for the Holy Grail. To prevent this esoteric journey from getting out of hand, one can try night photography, which can be accomplished right in your own neighborhood. This can be accomplished anywhere even in the rural countryside, where bright lights are few and far between.

When I was studying photography in college, we did a nighttime exercise that showed us fledgling students how to illuminate a building at night. This was accomplished by bathing the darkened edifice in light from the flash units of our hand held SLR cameras, while the image was dutifully recorded by another camera that was mounted on a tripod with a shutter that was left open for about one minute. The result was stunning, for the building came to life under the barrage of our flash rays. Our instructor, who was an experienced news photographer, explained that this was the exact method by which you brought back that one picture of an airplane that has crashed on the side of a mountain in the middle of the night.

Today, we live in a sea of artificial lighting that engulfs our highways and urban areas. Our big cities are now like beacon of lights that carry far into the night sky. These columns of light can be seen from afar, signaling the nighttime traveler that they are approaching an urban area. A nighttime flight across the country is particularly revealing in this regard. With the advent of the new digital technology and their extra light-sensitive components, one can now venture out into well-lit avenues of the night and record the scene with the flash turned off. Besides having a flash located right next to the lens is seldom a good idea. Most pros prefer side-lighting or filtered back-lighting.