Kurt Manley

It's always nice to see that some photographers still use film to shoot at night. Kurt Manley is a night photographer from San Francisco. The photograph below was shot with a Hassleblad 500C on Portra 160CN. You can see more of his photographs on his Flickrstream.

(Photo by Kurt Manley)

Gail Albert Halaban

New York photographer Gail Albert Halaban has a lot of night photography of apartment buildings and offices (and the people inside them) in her portfolio Out My Window. One of the fascinating aspects of looking inside other people's homes and offices is that it's so addictive. It makes me feel like I can peer into their lives without getting caught.

Gail currently has an exhibition through March 29th at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York City. I wish I could attend this show because I would love to see these prints in full size.

(Photo by Gail Albert Halaban)

Christian Hogue

Norwegian photographer Christian Hogue combines three of my favorite elements: night photography, panoramic photography, and crummy weather. His projects Arctic Technology and Barentsburg were shot on the way-north archipelego of Spitsbergen, where he's documenting the declining Soviet mining and Air Force settlements.

Check out his website for lots of beautiful full-screen versions similar to the image below.

(Photo by Christian Hogue)

Christian currently has his "Arctic Technology" on show in San Francisco at the Hosfelt Gallery (430 Clementina), through March 21.

How's the Weather?

Along with being a night photography junkie, I'm also a weather junkie. Although there are many weather forecasting websites out there, few of them are impressively accurate. That's a real problem when you're trying to plan your night photography outings. After all, if you're expecting to shoot under bright moon light, then cloud cover can make or break your evening.

(Peterson Field, by Andy Frazer)

Although weather "forecasting" sites ("expect partly cloudy and 10% chance of rain") are essentially useless, I've found that you can often do a better job yourself just reviewing some simple high-res cloudcover and radar maps, especially if you live in a world of microclimates like the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the classic internet weather sites (Intellicast) recently introduced a high-res, interactive weather map for the United States. Although the website doesn't seem to reveal where they get their raw data, this system looks very good. You can see recent, high resolution, data for anywhere in the US, and zooming and scrolling are very smooth. Unlike the popular NEXRAD data that many of the other sites boast, the new Intellicast maps don't look like a LeRoy Neiman painting.

By the way, the best hurricane geek site is still thestormtrack.com.

Brent Pearson (and the Open Source Photo Guides)

Australian photographer Brent Pearson took this great shot at Middle Head Fort, north of Sydney, Australia. Brent is the webmaster behind the Open Source Photo Guides, which is a volunteer effort to provide helpful instructions for photographers looking to visit great locations all over the world (it's easy to contribute...I'm the "host" for both California and Hawaii, USA). For example, there's even an Open Source Photo Guide for the location pictured below.


Brent was even nice enough to provide a larger version of this shot.