Night Photography Has Challenges
June Six Word Photo Story Challenge: “Black & White — Freestyle”
See Victoria by day and night.
My soon-to-be wife and I took our first trip together to visit the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication in Victoria, British Columbia. The city of Victoria was expecting crowds for Expo 86 and asked residents of Victoria and the surrounding area to open rooms in their homes to accommodate the crowds.
We stayed near the newly opened Sky Train, which provided service to and from the Expo. Victoria is a beautiful city, but we didn’t see much of it in 1986 since we were there for only a few days to visit the Expo.
In the fall of 1991, we decided to return to Vancouver as part of a camping trip up the US West Coast and onto Vancouver Island by ferry. My wife wanted to have tea at the Empress Hotel, where the Beatles had had high tea around the time of their 1964 concert in Vancouver. We carefully packed a set of our best clothes because the Empress had a dress code, and we thought we might not get in for tea in our regular camping clothes. We were wrong; all the other tourists were wearing shorts and T-shirts, but we got the best table in the house.
While touring Victoria that evening, we saw the parliament building all lit up, and I wanted to capture the scene in all its detail. Affordable digital cameras were still a decade away, so I was shooting film. I carefully framed the building with my camera on a tripod and took a night picture. I wasn’t sure I could get the building lights and details of the building in a single shot because there was too much contrast between the bright lights and the dark building. I came back the next day, set up my camera in the same spot, and took another picture, in the daylight. I blended the two pictures together in Photoshop, which I purchased in 1990 on a set of 3.5” floppy disks.
If you visit Victoria in the future, be sure to see the sights by both day and night.
