Digital Capture After Dark
© Philipp Scholz Rittermann
At night, cities often provide dramatic scenery which 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 to manipulate images in ways that short exposures don't.
This intensive three-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 two nights, and ample time in the digital 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.
A solid working knowledge of Photoshop is required. Students will have access to Cuyamaca College’s (www.cuyamaca.edu) state-of-the-art digital darkroom. On Thursday evening, students will be required to enroll as a Cuyamaca College student and pay required course registration fees of $35.
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.
