Tag: lights

Zoo Lights on Portra 800

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After a bit of a hiatus to deal with graduate applications/interviews, I am back to work on developing and editing film. I have a bit of a backlog right now in Lightroom, and I am hoping to get a lot more of my shots uploaded in the near future, especially before hitting the summer.

Back in December, we went to the Adult’s zoo lights night at the Denver Zoo, and had a peaceful evening experimenting with with the lights on film. We were hoping to use our favorite film for neon/halation effects, Cinestill 800T, but our local camera shop only had portra 800 available. We figured that Portra always looks good anyways, so we got a few rolls of it and hit the zoo.

Right off the bat, we found that it was relatively easy to meter the light for brighter subjects. For most of the lights, we slightly underexposed each subject to allow for easier separation of the subject from the background. This resulted in very pronounced, dramatic subjects. Additionally, any effects imposed by the film from shooting bright subjects at night (halation or improved saturation) were exaggerated against the dark background.

Some other interesting notes from this roll of film is that I processed these shots using Adobe Lightroom in lieu of open sourced image editing software. I found the algorithms to be slightly more forgiving in Lightroom, with more sweet spots in comparison to other software I have used. Below is a raw and enhanced image from Lightroom. For this particular roll of film (and style of photography), I was quite pleased with the results.

Before vs after editing in Lightroom. Of course, some artistic license is taken while editing shots, and even on this image it is far from perfect. It is easy to see the benefit to clarity and vibrance, however. In this shot, I was hoping to imply that the out of focus zoo-lights look like stars, planets, and nebulas in the night sky.

Keeping things mostly short and sweet for this entry, I will wrap up with some nice processed shots I like. This experiment was hardly novel, as neon signs or lights at night are classic photography subjects. What I hope to illuminate for myself and others is that portra 800 is a perfectly acceptable alternative to Cinestill style films for capturing lights at night. Around Colorado, it seems like Cinestill 800T is treated as a sacred stock for this type of application, but in reality there are probably many other stocks that could impart unique characteristics to night-time lights.

As a longtime fan of synthwave, I was very happy with this beautiful shot of my Fiance looking into the outrun sunset…
This is a close up image of a spherical Christmas ornament with a mirror-like finish reflecting light from neighboring LEDs. The roundness of the ornament bends the reflections, creating a nebulous effect.

As a final note, this was a tedious experiment. It was hard to meter the light properly (or even see the meter most of the time) and a lot of shots were plain bad. But this is the nature of film, and we think it was worth it for the shots that turned out. Find below some raw images that didn’t make the final cut:

It was challenging to get some subjects perfectly in focus, especially through nikon glass.
Some subjects felt too busy or empty, depending on the lights from the background.
This was taken on a 28mm lens, which causes the neat arcing effect, but this shot was too grainy.
Some shots had weird artifacts, including the black rectangle on the left.