A long exposure in deep twilight on my Pentax 6×7 film camera captures the tail lights of a car heading towards a fuel depot on Beach Rd. Monochrome is good for silhouettes and night lights. and with long exposures B&W film had the added benefit of not “going off” as much as colour film did […]

A view of Nelson’s southern suburbs at low tide, from the cycle trail near Best Island. A haze of wood smoke lies over the city, as does the light trail from a plane. The whitest lights are those of the airport runway. The distant hills mark successive earthquake upthrusts over several million years. The inlet […]

Mt Moturoa, New Plymouth. 7.08 pm, 21 April 2013 Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.  –  Ovid 28mm; ISO 2000. 30 seconds at f16. Incandescent light balance

There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley /                This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms  –  T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men 85mm; ISO 500. 30 seconds at f16. Incandescent light balance    

The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.  –  Thucydides 24mm; ISO 200. 60 seconds at f2  

Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week. –  Spanish proverb 85mm; ISO 640. 8 seconds at f5.6. Sodium vapour light balance

 Light tomorrow with today. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning 28mm; ISO 400. 30 seconds at f16

You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you.You have to go to them sometimes.  –  A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh 50mm; ISO 2000. 10 seconds at f16. Sodium vapour light balance    

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. –  Mark Twain 28mm; ISO 2000. 30 seconds at f8

Approaching city lights, Manawatu. 7.06 pm, 6 August 2012 Fall seven times, stand up eight! –  Japanese proverb 85mm; ISO 2000. 30 seconds at f9. Incandescent light balance      

To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.  –  Joseph Addison Driving north in the early evening, I paused on a 2 km disused section of the old highway, quaint now for its narrowness and rustic one-lane bridge. The night was cold and moonless, with a constant […]

Photographing at night can be fascinating because we lose some of the control over what happens in front of the camera.  –  Michael Kenna  28mm, ISO 2000. 464 seconds (7 min 44 sec) at f13. Sodium vapour light balance      

Ah the moon’s too bright, the chain’s too tight, the beast won’t go to sleep… – Leonard Cohen (I’m Your Man) 85mm; ISO 500. 294 seconds (5 mins) at f16  

Each of us is born into an already existent conversation.  –  Martin Heidegger 28mm, ISO 2000. 30 seconds at f16. Light balance 2500 deg K.    

What you do comes from what you think.  –  A Course in Miracles 85mm, ISO 2000. 13 secs at f11. Incandescent light balance

 Life is a badly edited film.  –  Fernando Trueba This was taken without using a tripod or cable release – just holding the camera open on B, on a guard rail on the Cook Strait ferry, has done the trick. The cloud is lit by moonlight, the lower part of the image must be the motorway the […]

To have made a beginning is half of the business; dare to be wise  –  Horace 85mm, ISO 2000. 30 seconds @ f11

The truth is more important than the facts. –  Frank Lloyd Wright I clambered up a cutting for this welcome perspective, then waited a while for a car to complete the picture, a 5 min 35 sec exposure. The car is actually a police car looking for me. A strange vehicle has been reported down […]

Too much light is like too much darkness: you cannot see. –  Octavio Paz Mt Taranaki and the Southern Cross. I’d had this viewpoint in mind for sometime, as it has a convenient carpark and a sweeping bend. Much depends on car speed, headlight direction and high or low beam – plus ISO choice and […]

Suburban twilight and new moon. 5.42 pm, 4 July 2011 Effort appears to be the main art of living. –  Harold Nicolson 28mm, ISO 100. 5 seconds at f22. Incandescent light balance.

[The object of art is] to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment. –                    Tennessee Williams The trick with any arc of headlights is to minimise the full-on glare of the lights, something likely to occur at some point in your frame. Here in the second frame from a moonlight sequence you see a short space […]

I say have patience, and shuffle the cards. –  Miguel de Cervantes, 1615 From the 153 m (502 ft) summit of Paritutu, the volcanic landmark backing Port Taranaki, the coastal outlook to Oakura is affected nightly by industrial lighting. Here we look down on Beach Road, leading to a well-lit tank farm but with little […]

When inspiration arrives I want it to find me working. –  Pablo Picasso “Some highway” means that I do not know exactly where this was taken. On Easter holiday near Tongariro National Park (central North Island), we were off for a drive-about, on the night before full moon. Here we might be on the Turangi […]

North Taranaki this week has been clear and mild for night photography by the  crescent moon. These slender new moons might give only the feeblest of light but if you can see your shadow by them then there is enough for moonlight photography! Nature also provides some magnifiers for moonlight, the best being its reflection […]

An industrial landscape at night; how lens choice affects star trails