For those that have been reading the blog regularly, you will remember that last week I purchased a new Nikon D90 digital SLR. This was a significant upgrade from the Canon that had been used to publish this blog. Although I still carry the Canon everywhere, because it's smaller and much more portable, the Nikon has great color reproduction. Now I just have to learn how to use the bells and whistles. In order to speed up the process, on Friday I spent the evening a workshop - "Monuments at Night". David Lurie is an architectural photographer, and leads these walks every Friday night. Check out his website at http://www.washingtonphotosafari.com/
If you've ever been interested in night photography, this walk was well worth the time.
The tour started at the WWII Memorial. The light was amazing for about half an hour. Just enough to create the blue glow in the sky, while the lights highlight the water features.
This is looking back over the WWII memorial from the reflecting ponds, with the Washington Monument in the background and also reflected in the pool.
The Korean War Memorial created some very interesting, almost spooky black and white shots. These statues are dimly lit from below, creating dark shadows. You can get very close as the walkway is right up against some of the men.
We walked to the Lincoln Memorial. This stop was packed with people, even though it was getting late. This is one of the memorials with special rules for photographers. No tripods allowed on the marble. This photo was taken with the tripod folded, but resting on my foot. It was several seconds exposure, and I can't hold anything still, so I feel lucky to have gotten this shot.
"The Three Soldiers" walking out of the woods seeing the Vietnam Memorial.
The photo walk ended at the Albert Einstein Memorial. I had never seen this memorial, how could that be? This is one of the few that you can climb on and interact with. In the darkness, it looks like Einstein is blending in with the leaves on the trees.
2 comments:
Awesome pictures! I certainly can't take photos like that. My DC night pictures turned out very dull, virtually black and white. And not good black and white photos either. :)
Thanks! and yet I can look at them and see things I wish I could go back and redo little things. The class was great, he gave tons of pointers on how to get the camera to capture truer colors. Most of these were several seconds of exposure, and use the camera's white balance to correct for the artificial light. After finishing, it didn't seem that hard after all. Helps to have someone there to suggest, go this way or that way and see what happens.
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