Capturing the Night in Digital Photos, Spectacularly
VINCENT
LAFORET remembers the moment he realized that digital cameras had surpassed the
human eye. It was late in 2009, and Mr. Laforet, a photographer who worked for
The New York Times for many years, was shooting in Los Angeles with the EOS 1D
Mark IV, a Canon camera that he had gotten as an early prototype.
“It was at night, and I
remember pointing this camera into a dark bush. It was pitch black — my eyes
saw just pure black,” he said. “But on the LCD screen of the camera, I saw
green leaves and little red cherries.” The moment was a revelation, he said. “I
was seeing stuff that I could not see with my eye, and I knew that we were
entering a new age of photography.”
Since then, Mr. Laforet has watched as digital photography
has steadily improved to be able to achieve something he long considered
impossible: photographing the world in the dark. Mr. Laforet says that sometime
in the last two years, photography crossed a threshold. The sensors in high-end
digital cameras can now capture light extremely efficiently, and the software
in the cameras, as well as in postproduction software such as Adobe Lightroom,
are now very good at reducing the grainy image quality associated with pictures
taken in low light. As a result, night photography without the aid of a flash
isn’t just possible — it’s spectacular.
To
prove it, for an hour and a half one evening last month, Mr. Laforet took me up
in a helicopter high over San Francisco. Using several cameras and lenses, he
shot images including a vision of San Francisco as an orange-and-blue microchip
shot entirely in the dark, with only minimal adjustments for color and
reduction of noise, or digital dots on the image, in postproduction software.
These
images are part of a series that Mr. Laforet has been touring the world to
produce. He shot the first set last year in New York on assignment for Men’s
Health magazine. They were meant to accompany an article about psychology, and
Mr. Laforet thought that the grid of the city, and the pulsing lights of cars
shuttling about it, resembled the synaptic wiring of our brains.
But
when the photos ran in Men’s Health, Mr. Laforet was disappointed by the muted
response. So, on a lark, he put the photos up on Storehouse, an app that lets you turn a set of
photos into a beautiful online story page. Storehouse attracts a large
community of photographers who immediately understood the significance of Mr.
Laforet’s night images. His Storehouse page of the New York pictures went viral,
and Mr. Laforet decided that he had to do more. He has since traveled to a
half-dozen cities, and has posted images from three. In addition to New York, he’s done Las Vegas, and is posting pictures
from San Francisco.
Notwithstanding
improvements in image sensors and software, photographing a city from a
helicopter at night isn’t a trivial thing. When he’s up in a chopper, leaning
out the door, with his body and his camera secured by straps, Mr. Laforet is
fighting two opposing forces. To capture the most light, he wants to keep the
camera’s shutter open for as long as possible. That would be easy if he were
sitting on a placid, stationary object. But helicopters aren’t placid. They’re
moving in all directions at all times. Even when a chopper is hovering, it
vibrates maniacally, which can be murder on photos taken in low light.
Mr.
Laforet combats this problem in two ways. He sets the camera on a gyroscopic mount, a rig that he
holds in two hands and that uses spinning discs to dampen rotor vibrations.
The other thing he does is
take a lot of pictures, several thousand an hour, according to an exacting process.
Before the flight, he decides on a few main shots he’d like to capture. That
allows the pilots to draw a rough flight plan and get any clearances they need.
The San Francisco images, for example, were shot from three primary locations
above the city, at two altitudes, around 500 feet and around 7,500 feet. The
higher elevation is unusual for helicopters, so the pilots on our flight needed
to request clearance from San Francisco air traffic control. Then, at each
location, Mr. Laforet instructs the pilots to make many passes of the skyline
so that he can take pictures from slightly different heights and distances and
with different cameras and lenses.
The shots in the set were
taken with three cameras: An 18-megapixel Canon EOS 1DX, a prototype 50-megapixel Canon 5DS, and a 50-megapixel Phase One medium-format camera.
After the flight, Mr. Laforet spent several hours looking through the photos
for the best 100 or so, and then he further culled the list to a handful. These
have been altered in two ways, in addition to reducing photographic noise, he
has adjusted the overall light levels, including altering the color temperature
to emphasize the blue lighting in the images over the orange lights. He has not
cropped or retouched any of the images.
