Blood Streams
Oct, 2015Views
824
Likes
Awards
Contest Finalist in The Moving Clouds Photo Contest
Peer Award
Superb Composition
Outstanding Creativity
Top Choice
Absolute Masterpiece
Magnificent Capture
Top Ranks
Top 30 rankTop 30 rank week 1
Top 30 rankTop 30 rank week 2Top 10 rank week 1
Categories
Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Discover more photos See all
Behind The Lens
Location
This is a view of the Ouvèze valley, near the city of Privas, in the south east of France. In this area, the river flows down between old ridges of limestone, before it meets with the Rhône, which goes to the Mediterranean Sea. I lived in Privas for a few years, and always liked to ride this road along the river, and hike on the tops untill I reach the cliffs ...Time
The night is coming, the sun is setting behind a thick cover of clouds, and the villages in the meadow just started to light up.Lighting
The light is all natural (well, public lights ain't natural, I know). Sunsets offer such dramatic effects, and I like when the artificial lights of mankind come into the game. There was a lot of wind up there, and with a reasonably long exposure, the clouds started to show some motion blur.Equipment
My camera was set on a steady tripod, and, as I wanted to plant a character into the image, and was the only one there, I had to use a remote sensor ...Inspiration
This photo is part of a long term photography project, called "Pollution nocturne". This is a body of work where I question the artificial lights, as a signature of mankind on Earth. Industrial sites, urban areas, at night, are my favorite subjects, and I document in an aesthetic way this perpetual glow. Maybe we are afraid of the night. For sure, like moths, we are fascinated by these electric lights, turning any factory into a Luna Park when night comes. However, we are also killing the stars even before we reach them : most people now live into big cities, where it has become imposible to see the starry sky ...Editing
This photo is a blend of several exposures. I wanted the global tonality to be dark. It was dark outside, I nearly fell off the track several times on the way back ! I made a brighter exposure for the model in the foreground, which also helped me to recover bright teeth on the limestone ridges on the left, and I melt it with darker ones, with one rule : the dark tones may almost be black, but never be really black.In my camera bag
I have a lot of cameras : Polaroids, medium format analogic cameras, plastic or heavy, home made cameras out of matchboxes, but I don't carry these around all the time ! My backpack contains a full frame digital camera, a couple of lenses (standard and fisheye, and sometimes a zoom), some flashlights to light the way or to help focus and compose, and an intervallometer in order to shoot series without nudging the camera, or to make timelapses. I attach my tripod to the side of the bag and let's go !Feedback
Sunsets are tricky. They are moments of intense contrast, long oblique lights and long canted shadows. The balance is fragile and, as if it weren't enough, this moments tumbles any second. Be on location before it starts, so you can capture the best of it, each and every moment. Even though I'm not a big fan of overachieved HDR pictures, I think this technique is really fit for sunsets. It allows you to recover the darker and the brighter tones, while the digital sensors don't have yet reached the perfection of the human eye, which produces HDR in each single view ... However, I don't blend my different exposures in a HDR software, I do this layer by layer in my usual editor.
