Trees at Night

This is a small project that I did back in 2012 using a Ricoh GRD2 – by current standards a “shitty camera” or “digicam,” the small-sensor compact predecessor to today’s Ricoh GR line. The parts of Berkeley and Oakland this was shot in have pretty notoriously bad lighting at night, partly because the streetlamps are competing with trees as well as utility poles.

The streetlamps framed by and shining through the branches around them produced odd, often eerie and vaguely mythological imagery that I found intriguing.

I’d like to revisit this at some point, but I have no idea what the results would look like today, partly because this camera is no longer operative and I don’t have another that is janky in quite the same way, and more importantly because most if not all of the lights in question have since been converted to multi-emitter LED assemblies that illuminate in a quite different way.