I normally get to work at 7:30am, which means that I get some interesting photo opportunities as the sun is coming up especially on warm days in the spring and summer when signs of life are just starting to be visible as the sky turns from black to blue. However, one morning recently I had to take my son to school to load the bus for an out-of-town track meet, which meant I would then get to work about 6:45am. My building doesn’t open until 7, so I knew I would have a bit of time to just kind of…chill, I guess. I really didn’t think much of it or what I would do, but as my son and I were pulling out of the driveway I came to a sudden realization about how I would use that time. I parked the Subaru, ran inside, grabbed my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens, and hightailed it back to the car to get him to the loading location on time. A few minutes later as I was walking between some buildings on campus after parking my car, I decided to take a slight detour to see if I could get any photos with what limited light there was.
And my goodness, what opportunities were before me.
I came across a row of whatever plants these are (perhaps coleus?), which were illuminated by the soft bulbs on the side of a building, and in the distance was the parking lot of the football stadium. I thought that if I could only take a picture of one of the leaf clusters with the sea of lights in the background, it just might be a fun and creative new way of seeing a familiar plant in a well-known location.
And oh my, did it ever work out.
I shot this at f/5.6, with Auto-ISO giving me a shutter of 1/125 which it lowered from my pre-set minimum of 1/160 after hitting the ISO ceiling of 6400. Basically…it was really dark and my camera had to compensate in a big way. I fired off at least a dozen shots here, hoping, just hoping, that one of them would be in focus with my mid-sized aperture of f/5.6. I also shot some others at smaller apertures but I really wanted those lights in the background to be as big and blurry as possible, and it really did work out quite well. And thanks to Lightroom’s AI Denoise, the final shot is about as clean as if it were shot at ISO 100.
I moved around a lot to get shots of different leaves as well, but this one was my favorite. (You can see two more if you click through to the original on Flickr, and look through my photostream.) I think the one thing that made this image just hit different is the second branch at the bottom. It added an interesting new dimension that was missing in my other photos, and then the lights coming up in the background, as if the coleus were literally poking up through them as it might emerge from the ground, added a whole other element of dynamic energy to what otherwise felt like a rather still, static, serene shot.
I’m going to try to remember this technique a bit more–that is, shooting photos early before the sun is up. It’s a bit counterintuitive, since you can’t take a photo without light, but this experience made me think about ways to get creative with the former when there isn’t much of the latter. Photography, as Dr. Ian Malcolm might say, finds a way.
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