Title • urban evenings

This picture (and the resultant two images) were taken earlier today and while they’re technically a bit weak, I do quite like them. At this time of year it seems that most people turn on their lights for the evening but don’t immediately exclude the world by closing their curtains. Perhaps it’s because darkness tends to fall at a busier time of the day than in other seasons, or perhaps it’s just that this is a time of day when such things are most noticeable. Either way, as I look out of our attic window now (around two and a half hours after this was taken) some of the lights have been turned off, and the curtains are firmly drawn.

As for the quality of these images: digital cameras, on the whole, don’t seem all that great at capturing images in low light and the main problem I had with this photograph was colour noise. It isn’t massively noticeable in the versions presented here, but in the original image it was quite pronounced. One (partial) solution I’ve found – that does a much better job than any of the techniques I’ve tried – is Fred Miranda’s ISOx Pro plugin that does seem to be able to minimise noise without overly comprising an image’s detail.

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The original version of this image had two people facing one another in the double window to the left of the door and, photographically speaking, it was a much stronger image. But, and this is a big ‘but’, it was pointed out to me that taking pictures of people in their own homes at the very least constitutes an invasion of privacy, and at worst is probably illegal. Hmmm ... good points. So, here's the not so interesting, ‘but I’m not going to be arrested, sued or thumped because of it’ revised version.

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