Night Photos

Well, near dawn and sort of close to night.

Cem's recent posts motivated me to post several recent scenes from the Midwest.


The barge made a lot of crunching noises as it navigated through the surface ice of the river.


The conflicting color temperatures of the river lights was impossible to reconcile, so this conversion to black and white was an expedient "solution".


Shortly before dawn this morning. One of my favorite places.

Thanks for looking, and for any comments.

Tom, these are joy!
I know I've been remiss in my participation of late, but I couldn't just gaze, smile and not comment.
Each has so much to absorb!
I'm fascinated by the first - on the rivers and open water here on the East coast I've never see a tug running with his floods on. It makes for an intriguing image.
The second works very well in B&W (and I'd still like to see it in color, conflicting color temps be damned!).
The last image, to me, conveys such a sense of deep cold. That bone-chilling stillness at first light. Well captured!
Always a fan of your work, you never disappoint me.
Thanks for sharing!

Hi Tom,

the first one caught my most attention.

I just reduced it to what I saw:

Hi Tom,

I like that first one a lot. The colors just reach out and grab my eyeballs. I think the bright circular thing in the foreground (a hatch?) is a little distracting. George's crop gets rid of that, but it also gets rid of the trees on the left, and I think they give a lot of context.

The last one I immediately recognized as the same location as your "Recession" challenge:
http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10289

I've been keeping my eyes peeled for something for that thread, but it's not as easy as I was anticipating.

Bob

Yup, little left and right.

Hi Tom,

John Angulat said:

Tom, these are joy!
I know I've been remiss in my participation of late, but I couldn't just gaze, smile and not comment.
Each has so much to absorb!
I'm fascinated by the first - on the rivers and open water here on the East coast I've never see a tug running with his floods on. It makes for an intriguing image.
The second works very well in B&W (and I'd still like to see it in color, conflicting color temps be damned!).
The last image, to me, conveys such a sense of deep cold. That bone-chilling stillness at first light. Well captured!
Always a fan of your work, you never disappoint me.
Thanks for sharing!

Click to expand...

I can only echo what John has written before me. Great job, thanks a lot for sharing these

Cheers,

Hi John and Cem, thank you for your encouraging comments! It is very easy to arrive at a location well before sunrise this time of the year, and the old familiar places can have a peaceful aspect that seems to disappear as daylight rolls in.

Hi Georg, thanks for the crop suggestion. A bit of selective elimination does cut to the chase to include the primary elements of the barge and lock photo. I have been making a deliberate effort to pull back and include more of a scene than I have previously this past year or so. It is sometimes difficult, especially when the air temperature is well below freezing, to determine when the framing chosen through the viewfinder is appropriate for the subject. Zooms can make the endeavor fairly easy, but I usually leave them at home these days.

Hi Bob, the orange round thing in the barge photo is a sort of bumper for river barge traffic. Constructed of steel and concrete, they typically line the up and down channel approaches to locks along the river. Usually silver in color, they reflect the light around them, in this case nearby security lights (sodium vapor?) caused the orange color. In the original photo, the snow in the lower left hand corner had shades of bluish green from street lights combined with the orange of the security lights. After fiddling a while, I finally just desaturated the snow.