Pavilion At Night   Ray Oltion

Several times this summer I went out early in the morning with my camera and super-wide angle lens. This is the pavilion at a park near where I live. The wide angle shot emphasizes the geometric shape of the pedestals and the roof. If the roof corners were turned up, it would resemble a Japanese pagoda. The picture was taken perhaps an hour before sunrise, when morning twilight was just appearing in the east.

My intent with this picture was to create a low-key rendition of the night scene with highlights from artificial lights. My time exposure also picked up stars, so I drew them in according to their actual positions. If you know your constellations, you can see the Hyades cluster in Taurus. It is the right pointing arrow with the group of stars in the middle, located above the pavilion roof edge that projects nearest to the viewer, in the upper right area of the sky.

The colors were pretty intense in the photograph even though it was night time, especially in the sky and the grass. I changed the colors in the trees and the pavement in the foreground to break up the separation of cool and warm in the upper and lower halves of the image. I also tried for some complimentary color contrasts, such as in the lavender / yellow and red / green adjacent shapes in the paved area.

The globe lights on the lampposts have a radial starburst emanating from each of them, but the effect is subtle. You can detect that starburst pattern in the pointed shapes radiating away from each globe. It shows in the grass and sky, as well as the columns and pedestals.

I used lots of radial gradients in the value scale, but then turned them into steps rather than smooth transitions. I then enhanced the edges of those steps with an embossing filter. Finally I applied a 4 level posterizing filter to exaggerate the stripes. The result pushes the image toward the abstract, which creates more dynamic energy in the forms.

Something like this would be fun to execute in glass, but it would be a nightmare to cut and fit the pieces. It could also be a candidate for sand etching on stained glass to get the curved overlay shapes. The digital version acts as a mock up for such an attempt.