Digital Capture After Dark
© Philipp Scholz Rittermann
At night, cities provide dramatic scenery that isn't visible during the day. Places, structures and events which seem mundane or commonplace in daylight, often reveal themselves as ambiguous, evocative, or charged with mystery at night. By compressing movement and time, photographs made with long exposures take a dynamic world and compress it into two dimensions. In essence, photographing at night allows the photographer to produce images that go far beyond the senses. Additionally, long exposures necessary for photographing in low light levels provide opportunities for manipulation which short exposures don't.
This two-day workshop will help participants to capture the atmospheric qualities only found at dusk and at night in an urban environment. We will split time between lectures, demonstrations, photographing in the field for one night, and ample time in the ‘lab’ learning how to optimize images. We will discuss optimum RAW capture and conversion, layering multiple exposures to expand dynamic range, and preparing files for output. At the end of the workshop, each student will walk away with a print from the Friday evening shoot.
A solid working knowledge of Photoshop is required. As this course will not have access to a digital lab, students should bring laptops loaded with at least Photoshop 7.0, preferably CS, or a newer version of Elements.
Philipp Scholz Rittermann’s (www.rittermann.com) work spans opposite ends of our visual environment, from evocative nocturnal scenes of industry and architecture, to dramatic panoramas of pristine landscape. His work is featured in over fifty public, private and corporate collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France. He is exhibited widely in national and international venues. An accomplished educator, Philipp has been teaching photography for over 25 years in the USA and abroad. In 2001 he was honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, which published a monograph of his work titled Navigating by Light.
