These photographs were taken and developed on a barmy February (2011) night. Night photography has always intrigued me, and this is the first time I have headed out to shoot a roll of film in these conditions. I used Fuji Across 100 developed in XTOL1:1 for 8:30 at 21C with agitation for the first minute and then for 10 seconds every minute afterwards. I used water as a stop bath, Kodak Rapid Fixer for 5 minutes, and finally, Hypo Clear for 2 minutes before the final water wash.

Night photography is simple with a digital camera, tripod, and cable release. With film, there are two other things to keep in mind. One is the high contrast situation, street lights and a dark sky. The other is film reciprocity failure. Recently, Lance Keimig published a new book on Night Photography. The best part of this book is it looks at both film and digital; I will give a review of this book in a future post.

The high contrast problem is about how many stops there are between the shadows in which you want to have detail and the bright points or light. This refers back to the zone system and compensation development. Something that I did not know there at the time; hence, it was not used here; I am still looking into it.

The film reciprocity failure is discussed in my previous blog post here.

One of the problems with shooting such a well-known landmark is that it is hard to find an original angle to make an interesting photograph. While this may not be the original angle, it was just a shot, and I had to get out of my system before looking for more unique angles. This is an important thing when taking a photograph or any tourist destination. Get a good photograph of the classic angles before hunting for the less well-known angle or finding a brand new one.

This was one of the early shots that I took during the sunset, looking into the sun. The sun is behind the sails, sitting on or below the horizon. What I like about the gentleman on the right of the shot is how his back ached. I like recurring geometric objects; here, his back and opera house sails are similar shapes.

This is my favourite shoot that night. When you first walk up to the opera house, there is a mass of stairs leading up to the doors, which don't always make it into the photographs as the long shots are generally too far away for you to tell. The sails are inspiring, and you want to get right up to them as quickly as possible.

As night was starting to settle in I started to look for detail shots. These tiles are on the western most side of the opera house which is the side that is used as a screen during the vivid festival every year in May/June. Tonight though they were illuminated with the normal spot lights.

After getting everything I could of the opera house during blue hour, I still had a couple more frames to use up before I could develop the roll, so I went on the hunt for more photographic inspiration. These escalators are not too far from Circular Quay and just screamed out to be shot symmetrically like this. I also used a long shutter speed to blur out the escalator steps to simplify the image.