Christmas on O’Connell Street

“Christmas is coming, Dustin’s getting fat, Zuppy is blue and Zag is still a twat…”  Anyone else remember Zig & Zag’s aptly titled “Christmas Number 1” single a few years ago?  Where by “a few” I mean, like, 19 years.  Ok now I feel old!  Anyway, the point is there’s less than a month to Christmas, the christmas lights are up on Grafton Street, and last Sunday the christmas tree on O’Connell Street was switched on.

The tree, which was unveiled for the first time, seems to be a little controversial and gets a mixed response. Personally I like it, and did so when I first saw it the day I took this photograph of it last year.  I haven’t yet seen it this year but I believe it is much the same.  It’s supposed to be a “green” tree in that it uses energy-efficient lights, but it seems that it’s non-traditional style (the fact that it is not actually green, for example) draws most criticism.

Photographing it was a little bit more difficult than you might first expect, especially at night.  The evening I took this shot I had just come from Sandymount strand, having taken my first ever shot of the towers at Ringsend.  By the time I got to O’Connell Street it was dark and so I had my tripod with me.

I knew straight away I wanted to do a really long exposure, for a few reasons – firstly to give me light streaks from the passing traffic, and also to ensure that many of the people who were walking by didn’t register too strongly in my image.  A slow shutter speed would register anyone who stood still for long enough, but passing pedestrians wouldn’t show up in the final image.

Even though it was dark, the street lights as well as light from the GPO, the traffic and indeed the tree itself, meant I had to drop the ISO and stop down the aperture to it’s limit of f/32 to get the 30 second exposure I was after.  I took a test shot and immediately confirmed a problem I suspected was going to arise – while the GPO and the street was well exposed, the tree and its reflection in the paving stones was overexposed by about a stop and a half.

I could have taken two or three frames, but with all the movement it would have been difficult to blend them seamlessly, or even do a HDR effect.  What I needed to do was stop light from the tree and its reflection hitting the frame for twenty of the thirty seconds, thereby reducing its exposure by the required stop and a half.

In the end I achieved this by holding my lens cap  over the right hand side of the frame for all by the last 10 seconds of the exposure, constantly moving it a little left, right, up and down so as to not have a very obvious edge to that area of the frame.  It actually worked really well, and I was thrilled to see this shot on the back of the camera.

Very little processing was required for this one – tweaks of contrast and saturation as well as a slight recovery of highlights were all that were needed.

It became a favourite shot of mine, and went on to score 50/50 in the January round of the Dublin Camera Club winter league last year, which was a nice bonus to reward the time I spent getting it right in the camera.