RSA Building, Dundrum

Another “Thursday night” shot for the blog today more because with a camera club closing date last night I didn’t have a whole lot of time to dig deep for an image to post and when I opened Aperture this is the shot that came up as having been processed most recently.  It’s not a big favourite, and is perhaps a little bit “more of the same” after some of my other “Thursday night” images (that being the night that sees me in town with a camera for a Commercial Photography course, you might recall).  But actually one thing this shot does is makes me want to go back and re-do it, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The building is what will be probably the last new building to be constructed in Dundrum for a while as I can’t imagine the next phase of the town centre is going to go ahead any time soon.  Recession or not, it looks like no expense was spared on this office block which is nicely lit, nicely landscaped, and catches the eye.  I remember when it was being built it was surrounded by hoarding that promised something that would be “worth the wait”, and I remember being underwhelmed when that turned out to be the HQ of an insurance company.  I was hoping for a Borders or a decent camera shop.

Anyway, as an eye catching building, it’s worthy of a photograph and so having paid a visit to nearby Rockfield for a haircut on Thursday evening I strolled in its general direction and found a road-side railing on which to rest my camera pretty steadily.  It was the tail-end of rush hour, so whatever shot I took would have traffic in it, so I opted to make use of that with a very long exposure to get the light trails from the passing cars.

Stopping down the aperture to f/22, primarily to lengthen the shutter speed, but also (once again) with those star-burst street lights in mind, I kept the ISO low as usual – unless you absolutely need to increase it, keep it low – and metered for a 25 second exposure.

To minimize camera shake I put the camera on self-timer mode so there was a 5 second delay between me pressing the shutter release and the exposure starting – time enough for the camera to settle.

There was an element of timing to try to get 25 seconds where the traffic was always moving as if any car stayed in the same place its lights would blow out the exposure.  I did ok on this front, and the fact that many cars were indicating to turn gave nice secondary yellow light streaks.

The white balance is impossible to get right in a shot like this because there is no one right value – even the building is being lit by about four different colour lights, while the road is directly lit by the sodium street lights, and indirectly by the car headlights.  In the end I just played around with the slider in Aperture until I got something that looked somewhat reasonable.

Why do I want to go back and re-do the shot?  Firstly, I want to clean my lens… shooting into a light source is unforgiving on a dirty lens, and mine clearly was.  Secondly, I want to take the shot earlier in the evening so there is some light in the sky.  And thirdly it would be lovely if the other floors of the building were occupied so that the lights were on there too.  Then again, I imagine the building’s landlord is having similar thoughts.