I had a phone call from young Danny this evening advising me that in the park the light on the snow was quite lovely indeed, so when Fiona got back we popped out with our tripods.
The thing is, the quality of light that Danny was referring to wasn’t actually that good for photography, or at least it wasn’t that interesting. As you can see above, once you adjusted the tungsten tinge out of the photo the night reveals itself to be a bit dull really.
Or you can leave the colour in, except that’s not really right as the above photo didn’t come out of the camera like that. I adjusted it until it looked like I remembered it looking.
What I think Danny was referring to was how weird the park looked with the lights of the city bouncing off the low cloud cover and then bouncing back up off the snow on the ground, creating this soft light seemingly coming from all directions. To a certain extent this is interesting in that there are hardly any shadows in these photos.
But then there wouldn’t be any shadows normally in the park so a long exposure of these scenes would pretty much look the same, only without the snow adding contrast to the trees.
The difference is that this shadowless environment is visible to the eye and that, if your paying attention with your soul, is something rather special.
Doesn’t necessarily make for interesting long exposure night photos though. Take, for example, my 4am photos taken in Moseley last year.
What made these work, and made them unique, was the direction of the light. The sky is dark but the buildings are lit as if it is day. That’s kinda odd and the sort of effect you can only get with a tripod in the middle of the night. But tonight’s snow photos just look like they were taken on an overcast day.
What you need for a good night time photo, I feel, is a light source. it can be street lamps, it can be a building’s windows, but it has to be there in order to make things interesting. Otherwise you’ve just got daytime only less so.
Still, the snow is awesome under foot. And that’s all that matters.