Knights of the Round Lens.

Night.  I’ve taken a slew of night pictures, I love seeing what happens when I mess around with shutter speeds and aperture openings with little light.  When I read Carmi’s choice for this week, I immediately thought of 4 specific sets of photo’s, and picked these six from them.

The first was from out at the Bonneville Salt Flats.  In my opinion the two best times to visit the Salt Flats are at night – when there is no moon and when there is a full moon.

We went out there once on the 4th of July to set off some fireworks we got in Wyoming.  In the city and the surrounding foothills they are dangerous, the dry brush catches fire easily and the fire spreads fast.  We’ve had people lose their homes because of careless, and inconsiderate, amateur fireworks shows.  But out at the salt flats there’s nothing to burn.  Just salt, salt and more salt.  Oh, and a little bit of water popping up every there and there.  Not a huge fire hazard.  There was no moon that evening, so out there away from any lights it was pitch black.  Serious darkness.  We got about 10 feet from the cars, turned around and couldn’t see them.  Not at all.  We had to backtrack, following in our footsteps in the crusty salt to find our cars.  We needed to be far enough away that the fireworks wouldn’t hit the cars, so we had to leave the dome light on one of the cars so we would be sure to find our way back.

Later we went back when it was a full moon.  That was even eerier, it was so bright it seemed like daylight, but not normal daylight.  Like being on a different planet.  The dark mountains in the background added to this other-worldly feeling.  The first picture for you is of my 1980 Toyota Corolla out on the salt flats.  This was back in the mid-80’s, so it was taken with my old Nikon 35mm film camera.  It was taken sometime between midnight and 1 AM, and at a high enough shutter speed that the camera was hand-held, no tripod, not sitting on a rock or other car or anything.

This second picture is from sometime in 1979, night pictures was an assignment for my Photography class up at the University of Utah.  This is on what is known as “President’s Circle”, where most of the original buildings stand, possibly even from back when it was The University of Deseret.  The building at the top is the Parks Building, the main administration building for the University. Almost every Halloween my friend and I go up to the Salt Lake City Cemetery for a traditional scare-the-heck-out-of-you ritual.  We also have visited “The Haunted Old Mill” and other spooky sights in the valley.  This evening we brought my camera (the new digital SLR Nikon) and a tripod and attempted to make our own spooky pictures.  I set the shutter speed to 20 or 30 seconds, then we would run into place, sit for 10 or 15 seconds and run out of the picture.  This is the result of one of these:   This one is another picture of the Salt Lake Cemetery, but without the artificial ghosts. The last two pictures are from an October trip down to Arches National Park.  They were taken in the campground, looking up at the stars over the red rock that surrounds the site. These two you will definitely want to click on to get the full view of.  Don’t to forget to check out all the other great night pictures at:

Thanks for dropping by.