Practitioners and resources on night photography

Excellent Aperture web feature on Gregory Crewdson. His work is amazing. I thought my process of shooting my Three Minute Series was complex, but his process makes me feel inadequate.

Equally fantastic is the night series by Jan Staller. Check out the Frontier New York series. Like Crewdson, they make images as opposed to taking them. Unlike Crewdson, he doesn't physically construct the scene. Rather, he explored the familiar areas around him and photographed them in a manner which makes them seem simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. One of the significant things about Staller is the seeming insignificance of what he photographs. He doesn't seek out the most obvious chooses. There are no photos of the Statute of Liberty or Times Square. In most of his photos, there aren't people. This adds to the otherworldly nature of his photos. The color is amazing. Most of his images contain large elements of neutrality to which the colors offer a counter point.

Here is a link to a guy who blogs about night photography. There are some links to some really good work from here.

Julian Faulhaber- very bold use of color. Great compositions and shots from everyday places that are transformed due to their absence of people. I love the basketball court image. Some are at night, others not.

Darren Soh - Check out his series While You Were Sleeping. Night shots of Singapore.

Harold Davis- He has written a boatload of books on photography. This is his site dedicated to night photography.

The Nocturnes - A group dedicated to night photography. I linked directly to their resources page. Be sure to also check out their image gallery.

DarknessDarkness - a site in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name. I showed you the PDF of the exhibit in class.

Steve Harper - Some really great stuff here. He taught a course on night photography for over 11 years or something crazy like that.

Link to an article about photograping the night sky and creating star trails.
Series of work on the flight path of planes.

Firefly images.


flight patterns from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.


PClix is a programmable timer for digital cameras.

2003 Documentary on Night Photography - FYI-All film work as it was shot in 2003.







Nice videos about digital night photography by Harold Davis. Audio quality is poor in the first one. Terrible in the second one.