Carpe Noctem Photography

Las Vegas

2010-04-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

Just finished a timelapse of a sunset from my hotel room at the Hard Rock Hotel while I was in Vegas.
I ended up using my LX3 because I don't have much practice shooting time lapse stills yet and didn't want to miss any of the sunset.

And of course the requisite stills with my 30D:

The Shark Reef @ Mandalay Bay:

Downtown Walk

2009-11-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

My wife and I went for a walk in the city last night with some friends to stretch our legs and soak up some nightlife. Eric showed me a great spot to shoot the Bay Bridge through the downtown buildings. Of course I had to take advantage and snap off a few shots.

I tried a panoramic for the first time using three portrait orientation photos stitched together hoping to get one large photo big enough for a monster sized print for my living room. It's definitely going up!

Mare Island

2009-11-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

Mare Island is a former Naval shipyard just west of Vallejo. Closed in 1996, it has lain for the most part abandoned on the bulk of the peninsula. I've been wanting to check this out place for a long time, first heard about via The Nocturnes.

Mile Rock Beach

2009-11-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

On the north-western most tip of San Francisco, near the Legion of Honour, lies a beach called Mile Rock Beach. It's not easy to get to (lots of hiking steep stairs and trails and climbing over a boulder strewn beach) but totally worth it at low tide. There is a concrete structure down at the end of the beach that is always covered in well done graffiti and with the addition of lots of rocks right on the water line, makes for an area ripe with potential images.

Sam's Castle

2009-11-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

I was granted access to Sam's Castle during the full moon, a real castle in Pacifica. We only had time for some shooting outside due to us all having to work the next day, but we'll be going back in a few weeks to shoot the interior. I have to tell ya... this place is like a mansion straight out of a Vincent Price movie... complete with a suit of armour and a throne with scepter and crowns! It was complete sensory overload!!! I can't wait to capture the interior!!

The front door:

The south side of the grounds:

The north side of the building:

The Wave Organ

2009-11-05T16:58:00.000-08:00

The Shady Night Shift Crew decided to visit a little known but typically quirky, fun little San Francisco spot, the Wave Organ...

"The Wave Organ is an acoustic sculpture constructed on the shore of San Francisco Bay by the Exploratorium. Through a series of pipes, the wave organ interacts with the waves of the bay and conveys their sound to listeners at several different stations. The effects produced vary depending on the level of the tide but include rumbles, gurgles, sloshes, hisses, and other more typical wave sounds. The structure incorporates stone platforms and benches where visitors may sit near the mouths of pipes, listening.

The Wave Organ is located at the end of a spit of land extending from the Golden Gate Yacht Club. The overall styling of the Wave Organ is reminiscent of Lego, or perhaps the exaggerated Lego scenery at the end of the movie Time Bandits. The stone pieces used in its construction were salvaged from the demolition of the Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco."

From wikipedia.org

Inverness Boat

2009-05-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

Just a quick shoot from last full moon of The Point Reyes, a beached boat in Inverness that's been there for years.

The Shady Night Shift Crew:

(l-r; Eric, Susanne, Emily, Sean)

Battery Spencer

2009-01-18T14:05:00.000-08:00

On the way back from a daytrip up to Bodega Bay last night, my friends and I stopped by Battery Spencer for a quick shoot. Last time I was here I was really dissapointed by the shots I took, so this was my chance to make up for it. And boy am I glad I did, because I am very pleased!

Baker and Marshall Beach Sony A900 Test

2009-01-18T12:56:00.000-08:00

Sony was kind enough to loan me an A900 pro DSLR to shoot the CES show with this year and I was obliged to get out and shoot with it and get a feel for it. I'm borrowing 24-70mm f/2.8 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses... let me tell ya, a full frame 24mp camera can capture alot of detail!! I headed up to SF once again with my buddy Eric (ec808 on flickr) to check out a new location for me, Marshall Beach, which is the closest beach to the Golden Gate Bridge on the west side that you can get. We stopped by Baker Beach first, and I got a chance to test out a panoramic shot with the camera and came away with a very beautiful image.

Next we headed back up to the top of the cliffs above Marshall Beach and found a bunch of old batteries and bunkers... definitely a prime location for future shoots. I got a few shots of the bridge from there, then proceded down the (many) stairs to the beach below.

As you can see, when zoomed in 100% in this image the resolution is large enough to read the street signs!

This will definitely be a location we will be revisiting in the future. Great sand and tons of rocks just at the water's edge will make for some great photography.

My favorite shot of the evening:

Part Deux of the Train Depot

2008-09-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

One quick one from the second round at the train depot, this time with no spider attacks. :-D

Abandoned Train Depot

2008-08-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

I went to check out a new location for some shooting, this time at an old train depot/yard. I got bit by some sort of nasty spider that I had to go on antibiotics for and my card reader went bad and corrupted my card, loosing the entire night's shoot. Needless to say, it was a very strange and memorable night. I was able to recover some of the pictures, but not all, and not my favorites. Oh well, it just means I gotta go back!

A Foggy Night in the City

2008-07-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

Another visit to Sutro and Stow Lake in Golden Gate park:

Byron Hotsprings Resort Ruins

2008-03-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

I headed out to Byron Saturday night for another shoot at The Byron Hotsprings Resort ruins. I got there just early enough to catch some sunset IR stuff and explore the place in the daylight. That place is super creepy... I love it!

During the Roaring '20s the resort was a popular location for Hollywood celebrities like Clark Gable and Fatty Arbuckle as well as sports legends like "Lefty" O'Doul. At the advent of World War 2, the Byron resort was purchased by the government, cleaned up after being abandoned since the Great Depression and was put in to use as a secret interrogation site for German and Japanese Prisoners of War. After WWII the Greek Orthodox Church bough the building and grounds and renamed it Mission St. Paul. By the late 50's the church abandoned it and it fell in to disrepair and has been abandoned since.

Walking around the building one can at the same time imagine both the place in it's heyday, all done up with beautiful fixtures and marble staircase and as it must have looked in it's army days with chainlink and barbwire everywhere. (actually it's alot easier to imagine the chainlink fences and barbwire... it just goes with the creepy atmosphere.) Although now, instead of soldiers and POW's, you'll find owls, bats, rats, and the occasional coyote up in the hills. All in all, it's a great place to shoot at night, with some great ambiance to get you in just the right mood.

I spotted a great horned owl which gave me a chance to try out my new teleconverter on my 70-200 f/4L IS lens.

It's An IR World After All

2008-03-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

Some more IR from today at lunch:

The Tiny World Magnified

2008-03-10T22:29:00.001-07:00

My macro ring came today, so I took the opportunity to play. Just a few tonight, but there'll be more to come.

The World in Infrared

2008-03-10T09:25:00.000-07:00

I have sort of rediscovered infrared photography with a revelation I had regarding my fisheye lens. It is not supposed to be able to take filters of any kind as it has a permanent lens hood and has no slot in the back for gel filters. I realized the hood has threads that allows a filter to be screwed on... it just has holes in the sides were the petals of the hood curve. I mounted the filter, then wrapped a few layers of gaffer's tape over it to seal the holes, then zoomed the lens out to 13mm and it works great. Of course I just had to get out and test it out and play with it, so back to Sutro I went. While I was there, as I was setting up a shot and showing my buddy Eric who was also doing some infrared work, clued me in on a little trick to make ir shots really pop and look the correct color without massive post production work... taking a picture of grass with the ir filter on, then setting that to the white balance. That trick and using the fisheye lens really did it for me and I am now really in to ir photography again.

These first two are from Sutro, with the correct white balance and everything:

This next one I changed the white balance on purpose to be red, a sort of end of the world type of feeling.

Here's an HDR I did after sunset at Sutro:

These are a few test shots I did before taking off for San Francisco Saturday morning:

And one bonus shot of a hummingbird in it's nest in my back yard:

Throwing Mud in Santa Cruz

2008-03-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

This weekend I made my what's becoming a normal trek out to Santa Cruz for some mountian bike downhill/freeride sessions, hiking in the hills for hours and hour, capturing all of the insane jumps and madness the mtb guys do. I must admit, I'd love to do the stuff they do and am living a bit vicariously through them caputring these images. Every single blister, bump and muscle ache is worth it just to get these shots... I had a blast getting these shots and I hope you enjoy seeing them as well.

W00t!!!

2008-02-21T13:58:00.000-08:00

I got a gig providing photos to Rocket Mobile for their cellular wallpaper galleries! I think it's time for me to pick up some new equipment. ;-)

On a different train of thought... I picked up a Canon 70-200 f/4L IS lens not too long ago and haven't really had that many chances to play with it yet, so i went out at lunch and snapped a few. It's pretty overcast and dreary out, but I got one that was decent. I think I am more impressed by the bokeh of this lens than anything else about the shot. It is sooo creamy smooth!

...And so it begins

2008-02-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

Well here I am posting to my first ever blog. Why start up a blog now? Well everyone else is doing it, so why can't I? You'll have to bear with me as I'm not the greatest of writers. But, then again, who really cares? I'm all about the photo anyway, not so much the written word. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce myself...

Firstly, I consider myself a night photographer first and foremost... a Shady Bastard, an night owl, a painter of light, a night hawk, a night crawler. My first love is shooting a long exposure under the light of the full moon splashing colored flashes over everything.

After that comes pretty much any other sub-genre of photography. I'm in to shooting cars (racing and still) and mountain bikes, I dabble in infrared here and there, once in a great while I'll even take a scenic photo during the daylight. I've also been known to go to the zoo once in a while and get some decent animal shots. But, mostly, it's all about the night.

There are usually all kinds of misadventure I find myself getting into at night, either while scouting around for a location, or in the middle of shooting and I've always wanted to capture that. What with the full moon coming up soon, I figured I'd get this started now so I can get it all written down before it all slips out of my mind.

So, to entice you back again, here's a few teaser shots: