Same place, more different worlds

As a photographer you know that “light” is one of the most essential variables in anything you do.
Living in a country as Finland, and especially in winter, you see funky things happen with light whenever there’s snow around. It may be in the middle of the night, and pitch black, but with a nice pack of snow, it could almost be twilight, because the snow reflects every bit of light.
It’s the same with both natural light and artificial light.

Yesterday I shot a picture of the street down here in daylight, the sky so overcast that it was a perfectly white massive softbox, good for nice and neutral colors.

This morning I set up the camera again, but earlier. It was still (or again) overcast, but there was the shade of this 15 minutes of civil twilight, where everything turns blue for a short while. It was just before 9am when I took the first shots, with the street lights still burning. It’s funny how the street lights seem to absorb all natural light and throw off this funky orange hue.
Below first the colors as the camera recorded it (slightly accentuated from the RAW file) and on second what I turned it into (because I like it better when it looks a bit warmer 😉 ).

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 5 images combined in Photoshop

But then, I actually didn’t know this was going to happen beforehand, the street lights switched off. It was in the middle of one of the 30 second exposures when that happened, so in that particular image (not posted here) you can actually see the after-glow of the street lights. That image ended up somewhat underexposed (salvageable, but not really interesting), but the following exposures gave a nice example of how big an influence the light, its color and the color of the environment influences the image you take.

Below again first the image with the colors as the camera recorded it, and the next one adjusted to how we “know” a snowy scene is supposed to look.

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 4 images combined in Photoshop

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From A Different Angle