That Magic Hour

Last evening's assignment was to photograph newly installed exterior lighting at a large resort on Maui's upper west side. The client, an electrical contractor based in San Diego commissioned these photos. The original plan was to shoot from a sixth floor room lanai. The resort blocked out a couple of rooms last evening for me to shoot from. Unfortunately, the necessary view was completely obscured from these vantage points by swaying coconut palms. Fortunately, I arrived early enough on property that I had plenty of time to regroup, rescout and find a new, suitable position for camera placement, giving me a much better and unobscured view of the hotel and lighting installations. As the sun set below the horizon and dusk began to creep over the landscape, I began a series of bracketed exposures, experimenting with different shutter speed and aperture combinations until the optimal balance of interior, exterior and ambient lighting was achieved. It was really quite dark when this (one of the last) exposure was captured. Shutter speed, if I remember correctly, was 30 seconds at f8 iso100. The slow film speed helped to minimize the accumulation of digital "noise" common when making long exposure with digital cameras.