Charles T. Low Photography

As I arrive on station, let's say an hour prior to sunrise, my camera exposures can be 60 seconds long, smoothing water and sometimes blurring clouds. Not long after, as the sun barely peeks above the horizon, the shutter speeds have dropped to the range of 1/250th of a second. That's almost 15,000 times more light than when I started (or about 14 stops, for you three techno-geeks)!

And if you told me that, for the rest of my photographic career, I could only have one extreme or the other, I would without hesitation choose the near-darkness.

I like the quality of the light when its intensity is low. I call it the Low Light, and if that's too corny for you, then we can't be friends (no, sorry, we just can't).

(Oh, and at 60 second exposures, the scene might not look very dark, even though I cannot yet see my camera buttons and dials. A photographer can, by adjusting the exposure settings, easily make a dark scene look bright or a bright seen look dark.)

This bears on the several past blogs which have dealt with my affinity for the light at dawn. It could as well be dusk, although whether the light then is identical remains unresolved. My own natural biorhythms favour dawn.

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Below, you may recognize the flaming red from the image above: same session, within seconds of each other, different technique. Note the decisive placement of elements within the frame; do you think it works? What about having so much almost featureless blue across the middle? How important are the wispy clouds in the upper left, and what is the name of that compositional device? (Hint: I think that I understand it, at least on some level, but don't know a name.)

It's hard to believe that I made the photograph above only eleven days ago. The weather changes rapidly at this time of year, and most of the ice which you see here has now left us.

The spot of light in the sky is almost certainly Venus — not critical to the image on an abstract level, but still cool.

The image below occurred for me a few days later.

I have resisted removing the footprints (and please tell me that they're not human!), requiring considerable restraint; I could consider them a distraction from the broader visual symbiosis. Of many viewers polled, at the time of writing, 100% wanted them left in.

While I don't see myself as a technical purist, but rather as a pragmatic photographer who strives towards exemplary images (with no claim about success), one recent morning I produced work using only one lens for the entire hour, and it is quite the lens: my UWA.

UWA means ultra-wide-angle, not quite synonymous with fisheye, although in this case it is both. I may talk in more detail about my history with that lens, and about its technicalities, but not today. Suffice it to say that I have a lot to say.

Except, I do wish to state that I love it. A few seasoned pros have dismissed it, with something like, Yes, it's a nice toy, but it feels to me entirely capable of making serious art. Sometimes, I just want to get that much in (as in: an astounding 180° field of view), and the effect differs from the (also very useful) panorama.

The image below, from the same session and with the same lens, illustrates that dawn always ends in sunrise.

I found the riot of activity, in that image, highly compelling and completely captivating, and ...

... as usually happens, the light, soon thereafter, interested me less. I packed up my gear, and headed back to the coffee equipment at my digital darkroom, where I (very happily) set to work on that dawn's output.

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Low Light

Every kind of light has its place in photography (some more than others!), and I do use them all. Some day I might produce a blog about how to photograph in full sun the (photographically horrible) light which shall not be named, which is at the other extreme. But I have always particularly luxuriated in a Low Light.

Remember to look through my portfolio. Almost everything is for sale. I favour large wall art, and also deal in small prints, notecards, and postcards.

I would love it if you were to subscribe to this blog, and to refer friends.

Thank you all so much for reading! Grace me with a comment.

Charles T. Low
Photographer
Blog #79
2022-03-21

P.S. I have an upcoming fine-art photography exhibition in Brockville — stay tuned for further details!

P.P.S. I have an entire online gallery dedicated to Low Light photography.

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