Field Trip to Night Lights at New England Botanic Garden (Tower Hill) and How to Use Long Exposure for Creative Effect and to Remove People from Shots

It’s the time of year when lights and light shows come out to celebrate the holiday season. This year was the first time I went to the Tower Hill Botanic Garden to see the Night Lights decorations. The visit was as part of the field trip with the Worcester County Camera Club, though I arrived a bit later than everybody else.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display Main Garden

The displays at the garden are beautiful and offer a variety of subjects to get your creative juices flow. Night photography of this type brings a set of challenges in addition to those you would have under normal lighting conditions. And then, there are a lot of people walking around, enjoying the show and the atmosphere, who you would not necessarily want in your shots.

Let’s get the easy things out of the way. All the normal composition “rules” apply, so I am not going to dwell on that. If allowed, bring a tripod. Granted, many cameras from the last five years both have a good low-light performance, and have sensor stabilization. If you have one of those, you might get away with hand-holding your camera. My camera is about twelve years old and has pretty bad low light performance. While it does have image stabilization, it is probably a couple of stops. Good, but not nearly enough. So, it is a tripod for me. In addition, if you want to shoot long exposure like the shot above, you would need a tripod anyway (but more about it below).

Trees Lit with Colorful Lights at the Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display

One of the challenges when shooting this type of scenes is getting the white balance right. Now, many newer cameras have a good automatic white balance, so, this might not be an issue. Mine is a hit and miss under these conditions. So, if you wanted another reason to shoot RAW rather than JPEG, white balance is it. Adjusting white balance later in Lightroom to suit your taste and to match the scene colors the way you remember them is easy.

Another pitfall you would not necessarily think of when considering night light displays is that they are very high dynamic range. Now, if you don’t mind blowing the highlights at the lights or losing all the details in the night sky or shadowy areas, that’s not a problem. However, generally, you want those. Or at least you want the option to decide later when you edit your shot. So, I suggest bracketing the images just in case. And that’s another reason to have a tripod. Now, I shoot exposure bracketed images hand-held all the time (mostly because I am lazy to get my tripod out), but that’s when you have enough light or when you need a fast shutter speed for other reasons, such as freezing movement in your shot.

Night Lights displays automatically lend themselves to sun-stars effect. If you don’t know what it is, that’s the spokes around the lights in the first image above. Those happen naturally to a varying degree as you close down your aperture, which you tend to do anyway if you want to get everything in your image in focus. The number of spokes corresponds to double the number of aperture blades on your lens and some lenses have more beautiful sun-stars than others.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display

Finally, what do you do when there are a lot of people that you don’t want in your shots? Well, you can wait if you are very patient and lucky. A little hard to do if there are a lot of people like on the night when I was at the Tower Hill, and especially if it is pretty cold and you can freeze your butt off waiting. You could also shoot many shots with people passing through and then try to remove people in Photoshop by combining the different shots. Doable, but sometimes can be cumbersome. And finally, you can use long exposure.

We’ve all seen images of water smoothed out by long exposure to give it that ethereal look or the shots with streaks of clouds to show movement. In our case, you want your exposure to be long enough so the people passing through your frame don’t register. Or at least don’t register enough to see like in the shots above, all of which were taken with a thirty second exposures. You do need to experiment with this, as you can get “ghosts” if your exposure is too short or the people are too slow. So, make sure to check before you leave. In my case, thirty seconds were generally enough during this trip, but if not, use neutral density filters to slow your shutter speed down even more if you need to.

Old South Church in Boston

Arthur Ravenel Jr Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina

You can, of course, use the long, or “longish” shutter speeds for other creative purposes such as creating the light streaks from cars like in the image above taken at the Old South Church in Boston or the one on the right taken at the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in Charleston.

For this, you will need to experiment (strange how often that’s the answer to our questions about what works best in photography). The reason is that you want your shutter speed to correspond to the speed the cars are moving in your frame. This will also be complicated by the focal length you are using. So, for example, the shot in Boston was taken at ten seconds, while the one in Charleston was fifteen seconds.

And just to have some fun at the end of this post, here are a couple of shots I took at Gloucester Cathedral during my trip last spring. These corridors were used to shoot scenes in the Harry Potter movies. So, naturally, I wanted to fill them with ghosts. To do that, I took several longer exposures with me walking into the frame for parts of the exposure, until I got the effect I wanted. And then, I combined several images in Photoshop to place the “ghosts” in different locations in the frame.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Ghosts at the Gloucester Cathedral