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There is a small park which is adjacent to a main north/south road within the city of Ashland, Oregon. In this park is a gazebo with a shake wooden roof covering a picnic table. The park is small and the gazebo is the only structure within the park. The roof is covered with moss and the gazebo is surrounded by a lawn.

This park has always intrigued me as I rarely see anyone using it, especially the gazebo. I have looked at the gazebo and thought on numerous different occasions that it would make an interesting night photo.

Finally, after several years of thinking about a night photo, I made my move. I went to the park during the day and thought of different angles for the photo. I knew I wanted to definitely include the moss covered roof. Looking around further, there were a few distracting elements inside the gazebo that I did not want to be included into the final photogragh. Such as a bin holding plastic bags for dog droppings. With a little moving around and thinking of different compositions, I came up with a plan which I thought would work.

I returned at night, and true to form, there was nobody around the park. One side of the park ended at a busy street and the other two sides (it was a triangle) had homes across the street from the park. The composition I thought about was facing the main street. I figured I could experiment with passing car light trails to be included into the photograph. This would add a little bit of an interesting element into the photograph.

I set up my tripod and camera where I had originally thought of, with good overall view of the gazebo and also a view of the main street in the background. Like I had said previously, I made sure a full view of the moss covered roof was in the composition. I placed a small light panel inside the gazebo to light up the interior, however keeping the light panel hidden from the camera behind a post of the gazebo. The light panel was set at a very low setting as I knew I wanted to make a long exposure to try and capture light streaks in the background from passing traffic.

With the camera setup, a light inside the gazebo, I was ready to start experimenting with photographs to capture what I was hoping for. I took a few photos while taking a small flashlight and running the beam of the flashlight across the roof of the gazebo. It took a few test shots before I was happy with the long exposure. I needed to make sure the shutter wasn’t on too long for the light inside the gazebo to be blown out. Once I had that timing down, I then needed to make sure the flashlight beam also covered the roof, but wasn’t on too long to overexpose the roof.

Once I had those two items figured out to my satisfaction, then I needed to have cars going by in the background. It was getting later into the evening and the number of cars passing by was becoming more scattered. I didn’t want to many cars with their headlights pointing toward me to come by as it was too bright for my desire. When I was happy with all the timing and light painting, I was able to capture a photograph with a city bus driving by the scene. This allowed more colorful streaks of light passing by in the background which made the overall scene to my desire.

The end result was, after waiting all these years to take the photo of the gazebo, I was very pleased with the results. It was satisfying to know, the photograph I had envisioned over all this time, came out maybe even better than I had hoped!