If you live in or around Madison, you know that practically everyone has taken a photo of the skyline at night. It’s usually taken from across Lake Monona with sparkling lights reflecting in the water. For years one of my deep dark secrets has been that I had never taken such a photo. At parties I always feared that someone would ask about my skyline photo. Well, I’m happy to report that I finally had the opportunity to take such a photo.
I recently took a Night Photography Workshop. The instructor was Hillary Quella. Photographing the Capitol was not the goal of the workshop. Rather, we had fun playing around with strobes to take multiple exposures and bright flashlights to paint trees and people with lights while the camera captured the results on a long exposure. It was quite interesting. However, the place we went to for the class happened to be off of John Nolan Drive in some trees on the shore of Lake Monona. Lo and behold, there was the Capitol Building on the other shore. So, I spent part of my workshop time with my tripod-mounted camera aimed at the Capitol. As with the storm photo in the previous post, the one below is a high dynamic range image. In this case I used four photos taken at different exposures. All were taken at f/8 with the times ranging from 2.5 seconds up to 20 seconds. The ISO was 200.
For a first attempt I think it’s OK. I really like the colors of light that smear across the water and the noise seems to be under control. However, I would like to find a place where most of the Capitol Building is not obscured by another building. I’m not sure such a location exists any more.
Here’s a non-photographic question for those who won spelling bees in their youth. (I came in second place to Margie Fritchen.) Have you ever been confused by capital versus capitol? It’s my understanding that the latter is the word for the building. So, even though my idea to take this picture was capital, the object of this picture is the capitol.
Here are a few more photos of the capital, I mean capitol.
(Click on any photo to enlarge, then use arrows to scroll through the images.)
