David Mendelsohn: The Power of Light
The weather wasn't cooperating the day David Mendelsohn was on location shooting for the annual report of Delmarva Power and Light. It rained, and even when the rain stopped, the sky remained overcast. "But," David says, "in my experience, no matter how overcast, you're going to get a period of time, just at dusk, when you'll get a brilliant blue-magenta sky." David set up his F5and 24mmf/2.8D AF Nikkor and waited for that moment.
The transformers at the power substation were lit by mercury vapor lights, and David was shooting with daylight film, a combination that will cause scenes to go green. "We usually use a filter to correct for that," David says. But not this time. When you're photographing a subject as unexciting as power transformers, a little light shift might be exactly what you're looking for.
David added one more element. He carries with him an auto emergency light—essentially a headlight on a stick that gets its power from a car's cigarette lighter (these days, more likely a cell phone port). During a ten-second exposure, David quickly walked into the scene and used the emergency beam to "paint" some light on the background structure. Later he scanned the image into his computer and used Photoshop for a bit of color intensification.
