Night at the Tank Museum 2 - this time we're indoors!
22nd October 2021
Robert and I headed to the Tank Museum at Bovington for a second opportunity to photograph tanks in the dark. After how much fun we had last time, we managed to drag my dad along, as well as Robert's son-in-law, Dan, and his mate Ashley.
Click here for Night at the Museum 1, out in the arena!
Last time was curtailed by storms coming in (standing outside next to large metal boxes amidst a lightning storm seemed a little foolhardy!), so this time they arranged it to be inside the museum. This was really good in some ways but a bit challenging in others. I think we all appreciated being in, out of the cold, but you can't get away from the fact that there is a lot of 'stuff' around the tanks. The museum staff did their best to move some of the explanation plaques and displays, but there are big backdrops and things on the walls that just couldn't be moved. Don't get me wrong, the exhibits and displays are brilliant if you're there looking round the museum, but we've been plenty of times and we just wanted to take pretty pictures!
The idea was that the lights would be off and the tanks would be illuminated by some posh LEDs. This added a different dimension to last time when we were outside - we only managed to shoot in daytime and twilight before the storm came in, so no illumination required. This time, we had to think about long exposure times and tripods to get the best out of it. That was a new challenge for me, and was really good to play around with different settings on the camera to get different results.
I do think, though, that the lighting could have been a bit more dynamic. I heard some people talking about making the light nice and neutral, avoiding shadows and all that - what's the point in that?! We're in the dark, I WANT to see some interplay of light and shadow, I want the tanks to look dynamic and imposing with stark highlights on bits of them. If I wanted to photograph them in nice balanced light wouldn't it be better to do it during the day? (apart from all the museum-goers getting in the way of the shots)
So, I think the evening was great, but could certainly do with some improvement.
- Some backdrops would be good, if they could hang some big black curtains behind the tanks to hide the displays and unsightly walls, that would be great. Doesn't have to be a perfectly flat background, just dark so the tanks pop out when lit up
- Use some more illumination in interesting places. A couple of the tanks had lights underneath - do more of that! Put lights inside them or under the tracks, get some interesting shapes and shadows going on.
- Maybe try some different coloured lights, I think again it's a good opportunity to do something interesting and different.
- Perhaps try and get things even darker from the ambient lights, so the spotlights are more effective - the light from the café in particular was a bit challenging to work with.
- Finally, it was a little unclear which tanks we were 'supposed' to be shooting, especially because they weren't quite ready when we started. I can appreciate the difficulty of setting it up to start almost straight after closing the museum, but it seemed to be a better set-up when it was outside.
Overall, it really was a great evening and I would be keen to do it again. The guys that do it apparently do a lot of the same sort of thing with planes (seems that this and the last one were the first events at the Tank Museum), so maybe shooting some planes next time would be fun!
I've put a selection of my favourite photos that I took below. I have done no messing about on the computer to any other them, other than a little bit of cropping here and there - the photos are just as they come out of the camera. I think there are some pretty good ones here. I did shoot a few other tanks (Cromwell, M48 Patton, Saladin armoured car), but wasn't happy with the results, so there's definitely a reason to go back in the future!
