The Barbican, Plymouth 6th May 09

As a totally separate project, I decided to visit the Barbican, which is a location in Plymouth near the Hoe and also the harbour. The reasoning behind wanting to visit this location is because I have been considering how my star photography could be related to activities in the centre of a metropolitan area. Basically so the two completely different settings would contrast with each other and create a good mix of night time photography to show in my final show in Summer 2009.

With these images I wanted to show built up areas with all their artificial lighting still feature the massive expanse of space above which is largely unexplored by us, while we all go about our daily lives in these small areas such as on the Barbican in Plymouth.

As for composition, these photographs would again be shot in a portrait style with the sky above featuring in at least 1/3 of the image and the port area featuring in the bottom proportion. The area of man-made structures will feature many artificial light sources such as lamp posts, interior lighting and other light sources on at the time.

Here are some of the images which I shot to try to get to grips with how the idea would pan out:

Photo Factfile
Shutter Speed: 10 seconds
Aperture: f8.0
ISO: 100

This image only shows the buildings and the artificial lighting being produced by them, which doesn't show the expanse of the sky above, so doesn't fulfill the idea I discussed above:


Whereas the image below, does begin to fulfil the idea as the moon can be seen drifting in and out from the cloud cover above while the foreground subject is overexposed due to the ambient light, so getting a photograph which makes the most of both the sky and the foreground is difficult:


Composition
I did decide to move the camera slightly to make the most of some foreground interest which I found nearby, in the shape of these railing shown in the photograph below:


Having shot the photograph, I found it very difficult to get a medium exposure which took into account the foreground and background of the image, as now it featured three different elements: the railings, the buildings and the sky.

With the image below, I tried to bring out the details in the sky by capturing the moon when it appeared from behind the cloud and followed it through till it went behind the clouds again:


Then for my final attempt, I allowed the shutter to stay open for a little longer to get more detail amongst the clouds above giving me this effect below:


The Vibe Cafe/Bar
I decided to move locations and see what I could get from a slightly different angle, I found this bar a little way from where I was originally stood which gave off a different lighting than your normal orange glow so made about composing it into an image with the moon in the background:


I tried some different photographs as shown above, which were taken from the bottom of a stairway outside the bar, I really do like the composition in the photograph but I just can't see now how it would work with my star trail photography, it is completely different.

Unfortunately with these photographs taken on the Barbican in Plymouth, i couldn't really see how they would fit with my other images of the star trails, so I have decided to cease my development of this idea as it simply doesn't sit alongside my star trail photography. I may well choose to look at this in the future as I can see, with a little more work, I can produce some good images here, however for now I am going to stick with my star trails to make sure my project doesn't lead off on a tangent.