A cold misty Decembers evening as people hurried home from the relatively deserted city centre was the setting for this shoot. The team from Atmosphere Productions had backlit the stained glass windows as well as adding vivid colour uplighting to the exterior of the Cathedral.

Due to the available dynamic range, I decided to bracket my exposures and then I could use luminosity masks in Photoshop to produce the final images blending the best parts from the different images to produce something natural looking and not too over-processed. 

Most of the shots were captured at 16mm at ƒ / 3.5. Ideally, on the longer shots, I wanted to pull back the visible background and blur it out using my depth of field and the increasingly foggy night helped with this.  

It had been raining through much of the day of the Hepworth Gallery shoot, but by the evening had stopped leaving many wet reflective surfaces to take advantage of.  

The challenge in this location would be introducing interest to the images of the lit grounds. Again the team from Atmosphere Productions had lit the site but this time there were many more lights in use as well as dynamic effects which painted the bland grey building of the gallery in bright saturated colour. Once again I felt dynamic range would be a challenge so opted to bracket my exposures so that I could blend them in post-production. The wind was slightly breezy so I also decided to make some long exposures to capture some of that movement of the light.      

Some of the shots were captured at 16mm at ƒ / 3.5 while the motion-blurred ones were anything up to 16mm at ƒ / 22. over 4 seconds and using the remote shutter release was essential for these.

The final location of the three-day shoot was the National Coal Mining Museum. Again it was raining on and off so there was a limited window of time to get the shots. This was the largest site of the shoot and the team from Atmosphere Productions had been rigging equipment most of the day to get things done in time including a cluster of moving heads placed on the top of the Pithead. 

The challenge in this location was firstly the size of the site. Getting around everything, working out compositions and ideas I wanted to capture. The site has a lot of texture and details, not just in the various relics of equipment scattered around the site but in the buildings themselves.  The second challenge was the dynamic range once again and the third was the worsening weather.

Most shots were captured between 16mm and 28mm at ƒ / 13 as I wanted as much as possible to be in focus. I wanted to keep my ISO as low as I could to avoid noisy images in the dark areas so shutter speeds were long, sometimes up to a minute or more. I was shooting different exposures of each scene so they could be blended in post-production. Using the ‘bulb release’ function of the camera with my remote shutter meant I could keep the camera in the same position without needing to touch the camera at all which made lining images up in Photoshop easy.