Urban Landscapes at Night

This time of year when the nights are drawing in is a great opportunity to get your camera out and head into large towns or citys and have a go at long exposure.

Over the past month or so I have been doing more of this, first starting with York, then Newcastle, and most recently Middlesbrough. I've also been trying to think 'out of the box' and not go for the classic shots.

The photo above is in Newcastle, and I timed the shot right to get a bus going from left to right, from one corner to another.

During my little jaunts, I have found it better to underexpose the photo quite a bit, then bring the details back in the processing stage. This saves a lot of blown highlights, although some are going to appear depending on how long the shutter is open for.

I always shoot in RAW (digital negative) and in manual mode to end up with the best results. This image of Infinity, Stockton-on-Tees is a great example. When I set my camera up for this shot, it was telling me I needed an exposure time of 5 seconds because of the dark sky. By setting a focus point over the more brighter part of the image, I ended up with an exposure time of 1.6 seconds.

The photo below is SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera) so you can see a good comparison - in the next few days I will do another post showing a walkthrough of my processing, using Adobe Lightroom, to give you an idea of my settings.

Light trails varied in exposure time, depending on how much traffic there was and what other ambient lighting was near by. Again by under exposing the photo below, I was able to get a more pleasing look in post processing.

Using an external flash gun mounted on top of my camera set to 'rear curtain' I managed to capture movement and lighten the foreground creating a different setting and also lighting up faces a little. Using rear curtain mode also helped separate the main foreground subject (the bus stop and people walking) from everything else.

While in Middlesbrough the other night, a good friend and myself decided if we could get up a height for more light trails shots. For the photo below, we were on the topmost floor of Zetland Car Park, just of the A66 - a place definetly ear marked for more visits.

Need to point out here that we were pulled up by one of the parking attendants about being up there taking photos without letting anybody know. Now not sure if he was being funny because the car park was due to close within half an hour, or it was health and safetey - just a friendly heads up for anyone else wanting to venture up there.

It's not just colour that works well with Urban Landscapes at night, black & white certainly has its place to:

What I like about the photo above is the way you are lead into the iconic bridge by the varying lines. The shadows and textures stand out really well in black and white too. I used a free Adobe Lightroom preset for the basis of this photo, then tweaked it to my own liking.

It was the light being cast along the roof/floor of the viewing area that caught my attention on the above image of the Baltic Centre, Newcastle Quayside. Straight away I new I would be shooting with black and white in mind.

Not a shot I've come across before, well not from this view any way. The Infinity Bridge reflected in the windows of the local University. I spent ages trying to position myself in the right place with the camera to get the above shot.

Again it was the shadows and textures that caught my eye for the above photo.

Finally, back to a colour image to end with - the below photo is Stockton-Highstreet with its illuminating water feature.

All the photos in this post are sot in manual mode, in RAW format and taken using a Nikon D90, either 10-20mm wide angle lens or my standard 18-105mm kit lens, and they were processed using Adobe Lightroom but can easily be processed in your own favoured software package.

Think I can honestly say I have been bitten greatly by the Night Time Urban Landscape bug, and I can't wait to get out an do more.

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