Capturing the night in digital photos

Vincent Laforet remembers the moment he realised digital cameras had surpassed the human eye. It was late in 2009, and Laforet, a photographer who worked for The New York Times for many years, was shooting in Los Angeles with the EOS 1D Mark IV, a Canon camera he had gotten as an early prototype.

“It was at night, and I remember pointing this camera into a dark bush. It was pitch black - my eyes saw just pure black,” he said. “But on the LCD screen of the camera, I saw green leaves and little red cherries.” The moment was a revelation, he said. “I was seeing stuff that I could not see with my eye, and I knew that we were entering a new age of photography.”

Since then, Laforet has watched as digital photography has steadily improved to be able to achieve something he long considered impossible: photographing the world in the dark. Laforet says that sometime in the last two years, photography crossed a threshold.

The sensors in high-end digital cameras can now capture light extremely efficiently, and the software in the cameras, as well as in postproduction software such as Adobe Lightroom, are now very good at reducing the grainy image quality associated with pictures taken in low light. As a result, night photography without the aid of a flash isn’t just possible - it’s spectacular.

To prove it, for an hour and a half one evening last month, Laforet took me up in a helicopter high over San Francisco. Using several cameras and lenses, he shot images including a vision of San Francisco as an orange-and-blue microchip shot entirely in the dark, with only minimal adjustments for color and reduction of noise, or digital dots on the image, in postproduction software.

These images are part of a series Laforet has been touring the world to produce. He shot the first set last year in New York on assignment for Men’s Health magazine. They were meant to accompany an article about psychology, and Laforet thought the grid of the city, and the pulsing lights of cars shuttling about it, resembled the synaptic wiring of our brains.

But when the photos ran in Men’s Health, Laforet was disappointed by the muted response. So, on a lark, he put the photos up on Storehouse, an app that lets you turn a set of photos into a beautiful online story page.

His Storehouse page of the New York pictures went viral, and Laforet has since travelled to a half-dozen cities and has posted images from there.

Notwithstanding improvements in image sensors and software, photographing a city from a helicopter at night isn’t a trivial thing. When he’s up in a chopper, leaning out the door, with his body and his camera secured by straps, Laforet is fighting two opposing forces. To capture the most light, he wants to keep the camera’s shutter open for as long as possible. That would be easy if he were sitting on a placid, stationary object. But helicopters aren’t placid. They’re moving in all directions at all times.

Laforet combats this problem in two ways. He sets the camera on a gyroscopic mount, a rig that he holds in two hands and that uses spinning discs to dampen rotor vibrations.
The other thing he does is take a lot of pictures, several thousand an hour, according to an exacting process. Before the flight, he decides on a few main shots he’d like to capture. That allows the pilots to draw a rough flight plan and get any clearances they need.

The shots in the set were taken with three cameras: An 18-megapixel Canon EOS 1DX, a prototype 50-megapixel Canon 5DS, and a 50-megapixel Phase One medium-format camera. After the flight, Laforet spent several hours looking through the photos for the best 100 or so, and then he further culled the list to a handful.

These have been altered in two ways, in addition to reducing photographic noise, he has adjusted the overall light levels, including altering the colour temperature to emphasise the blue lighting in the images over the orange lights. He has not cropped or retouched any of the images.