One of the locations I kept returning to for Concrete Hours was a stairwell with a long window on one side and a single strip light that never seemed quite steady. From outside, across the street, the stairwell turned into a set of grey planes, and every now and then a car passing below drew a line of red light along the bottom of the frame.
I made a handful of stills there, but the place was really about the movement: the flicker of the tube, the passing light, the stillness of everything else. This short loop is from the last evening I went back.
Setting up
The camera sat on a small tripod on a low wall across the street. I framed so that the stairwell filled most of the picture and the road was just out of view below, which meant the cars appeared only as light. Focus and exposure were set by hand and locked; automatic exposure would have tried to compensate for every passing car, and the background would have pulsed.
What I kept and what I cut
I recorded about twenty minutes. Most of it is nothing happening, which I liked, but which doesn’t make for a short loop. I picked a few seconds where a single car passed through the frame and the strip light dipped once, trimmed it so the beginning and end match, and slowed it down a little.
The colour is close to what the camera recorded: the cold light of the stairwell, the warmer sodium glow from the street lamps reflecting off the concrete, and the red of the tail lights. I resisted the urge to grade it toward the teal-and-orange look that night footage often gets, because the place wasn’t like that.
A note on grain
The clip is noisy. It was recorded at a high ISO with a fairly wide aperture, and I left most of the texture in, for the same reasons I left it in the stills. On a moving image grain changes from frame to frame, which gives the dark areas a slight shimmer. I find it more truthful than the smooth, waxy look you get from heavy noise reduction on night video.
Why not a proper film?
People occasionally ask whether these loops will turn into longer films. Possibly, one day. For now they are sketches — a way of seeing a location in time rather than in a single frame, made with the same patience and the same small kit as the photographs. They sit next to the series rather than replacing it.
If your device is set to reduce motion, you will see a still frame here instead.