By the Light of the Night

Join me on the Journey of how Colour Night Photography Launched My Creative Journey in the 1980's. Colour night photography is what got me started on my creative photography journey in the 1980's. Till then there was very little night photography and almost no colour nght photography. I was inspired by Californian trail blazer Arthur Ollman.

Sometimes magic happens and so it did with this photograph, complete with washed up coke bottle.

In the 1980's colour film technology advanced to the stage where it became usable at night by amateurs, meaning it did not need the resources of a university astronomy department to get results. There were of course a number of issues to resolve such as a complete absence of tech on how to expose film at night. If you used normal technique, the photos would be almost totally black - which while it could be argued as being correct, was not what I wanted which was to see night as if it were daylight.

Exposure time was 2 cups of coffee at f2.8 under starlit night. It was too dark for a light meter reading and there is more intuition than science with this.

By overcoming the tech issues using scientific stye trial and error over a year, I was able to reliably get the exposure I wanted, which in photography is 101.

Using film allowed me to record night scenes in COLOUR, which is something our eyes can't do. At night we see in monochrome. Creatively, this opened up a world that needed exploration, which is what I did for nearly a decade.

Meredith, my creative partner. We used to use ourselves as models. In this case it required standing still for 3 minutes 20 seconds.

Interestingly, this night photography work gave me the technical grounding to launch my advertising photography career, if a bit shakily at the start, and gave me the colour and

visual literacy that guided my later work.