Today I’m going to take you all through the process of creating what ended up being my favorite photos of all time.
Over the summer, I made a bucketlist of film stocks that I wanted to try out. One of those being Kodak Portra 800, a nighttime film. I had a very specific vision in my mind; I wanted to go to a NJ beach-town and capture the neon lights of the boardwalk in contrast with the darkness of night. I had been inspired to do this by the work of a film photographer named Oscar Diaz (an example pictured below).
Now, I had the vision, but no clue as to how to execute it. You see, nighttime photography can be quite finicky. With such little light to illuminate your photos, pictures can easily end up blurry, grainy, dark, etc. Knowing this, I got to researching how to capture the perfectly well-lit photo at night.
The first thing I learned was that I’d need to use a tripod and a shutter cable (both devices that reduce the chances of camera shake and consequently blurry photos). I also found out that the reason why blurry nighttime photos are so probable is because you have to open your shutter for a long period of time in order to let enough light in. After researching even more, I learned about other things I needed to consider when taking long exposures such as “reciprocity failure” which has to do with a film stock’s ability to react to light over time. I watched video after video of film photographers going on nighttime shoots, taking note of the camera settings they used. I even DMed the photographer I mentioned above and asked him what settings he used for his shots.
After all of that research, I finally felt ready to give things a try. So, I grabbed an old tripod of my parents, a shutter cable my grandma gifted me, my assistants (a.k.a. my cousins), and we headed to Point Pleasant, NJ.
Taking a single photo took at least five minutes. Each time, I had to set up the tripod to the correct height, recallibrate my camera to the correct settings for my lighting situation, and finally steady my camera to take the shot. The boardwalk was so busy that I’d often have to wait a few extra minutes for people to walk by.
After about 2 hours of shooting, we finally headed home. Not long after, I took my roll to be developed, and 3 days later, my roll was ready to be picked up. I pulled up the scans, and to both my shock and my delight, the photos turned out exactly how I envisioned them! See below:
Moral of the story, hard work can pay off!