Foggy Night

Last night, my wife and I watched Experiment in Terror, a 1962 neo-noir thriller starring Lee Remick, who sported some absolutely awesome early 1960s fashion. There was also an unexpected bonus toward the end: baseball! The final scenes take place at the old Candlestick Park, which was only a few years old when the movie was filmed.

I’m not sure if seeing that old black and white movie was my main source of inspiration, but when we finished watching it at around 10 pm, I felt a sudden inspiration to go into town to do a bit of nighttime street photography. We were under a dense fog advisory last night into this morning, and I had never attempted any photo shoot in town with fog at night.

There is a certain peacefulness that I’ve grown to love about wandering around town with a camera at night. I felt that way all the more with the heavy fog that enveloped town and that gave me a new perspective on familiar sights.

Technically speaking, I added some noise in postproduction to simulate the grain of high-speed film. There’s an irony to taking images from my Canon EOS R8, whose full-frame sensor does such a great job with delivering smooth, noise-free images even at high ISOs, and purposefully adding noise to them. But I think doing so added to the effect I intended for these images.