Recently I read about taking exposures at night, lasting perhaps ten minutes, and using nothing but ambient moonlight or the general glow of the night sky. It’s supposed to give a strange feel to photographs – they appear to be lit as brightly as in the day, but something is “wrong” with them. I decided to have a go.
My real night shots were taken on film using the Zorki, but in order to judge the exposure I needed some kind of light meter. I decided to use my digital camera as a meter. I haven’t developed the film yet, so I don’t know if the experiment worked. However, during each of the 8-minute exposures, I had time to play around with the digital camera too.
Digital cameras are not well regarded for their low-light performance but I think the results are still interesting, even if I am expecting the results on film to be vastly superior. As my digital camera doesn’t particularly like exposing for more than 30 seconds, these are all short exposures, and hence don’t capture the same ambience I described above.
Jonathan Gazeley 