Neon: Dover

The icons of Third Street, Dover, NH

I had been waiting for the right conditions. Snow, wet reflective surfaces, and getting up the motivation to go out in it (sometimes the hardest part). In early January the conditions were right, so I grabbed the tripod, loaded my last roll of Cinestill into my Rollei 3.5 M-X-V and plodded up the hill in hopes to shoot the Ross Family Furniture sign, one of the icons of Third Street in Dover, New Hampshire. However, on this night…no such luck…the neon sign was off. I tried to make the walk out in the cold worthwhile by shooting something else. The asian restaurant on the main thoroughfare had some nice tube lighting, bare bulbs nearby, and the streetlights might have been interesting, especially if people were sitting inside, silhouetted by dim light. My prediction was right, the tableau was nearly perfect, however my metering was not.

I got cocky.

It was almost as if everything that I had learned on that cool misty romantic October evening in Fargo when Cinestill swept me off my feet had gone out the window, a love note turned into a crumpled copy of a supermarket flyer tumbling in the wind into the Cocheco River only to be swept away in it’s icy current. In actually my metering was correct, however I misread 1/4 of a second to be 4 seconds. Perhaps Cine would be as forgiving as I perceived her to be?

I attempted one more photo after I realized my mistake. The slide at the playground behind the Seacoast Children’s Museum was lit, a green beacon that might make for a good subject. Perhaps this could have been a decent photo if I hadn’t felt discouraged thanks to the neon sign not being lit and my bad interpretation of the meter reading. However, I couldn’t find a vantage point high enough to interpret the subject well. So, acknowledging that I wasn’t working for my images, I retreated to the warmth of home, recovering with a nice glass of cognac. It’s New England in winter after all, the conditions should present themselves again.

February 4th came. It had been snowing steadily all afternoon and evening. I was on my way home and noticed that both the Ross and Strand Theatre signs were lit up. Perhaps this was my chance to woo Cinestill 800 and try to get back into her good graces? The likelihood of me getting these conditions again would be very low, at least in the immediate future, since it was February when our weather can unpredictably warm. Normally I would walk from my home, down the hill, follow the Cocheco River briefly with its expected cold wind resulting from hydraulic influence, and then up the hill into downtown. But, but this night was pretty brutal. It was actively snowing and the air was damp. I wussed out. New Englanders are known for being a hardy bunch, enduring inclement weather just as salty as their disposition. However, there comes a point where even your saltiest of New Englanders, which I am not, will stay home and not venture out because it is not practical to do so. Tonight was one of those nights and I, going against all common sense, was hell bent on finishing this roll while the snow was still falling.

The Strand Theatre

I drove my trusty Subaru through the mostly empty streets of Dover, and parked in the bank lot right across the street from The Strand Theatre, that other icon of Third Street in Dover and our oldest theatre. Established in 1913, it still operates in its original tradition of vaudeville, musical staged theatre and as a cinema. The wind numbed my hands as I grabbed the tripod and camera bag. Pulling my toque further down over my ears, I slogged through the mashed potatoes that had accumulated on the parking lot and sidewalks, and set up the tripod between The Asia and Ross Family Furniture. The reflections of streetlight and neon where beautiful.

The act of setting up the tripod and camera was a welcome ritual, giving me as much comfort as Sunday mass gives a church goer. There’s comfort even in the middle of discomfort. The snow and ice was slung sideways by the frigid wind, stinging the skin of my mostly covered face. I thought framing the shot was going to be just as easy as that damp night in Fargo, however I was wrong. I had envisioned the neon sign of both Ross and The Strand filling the frame, light pooling on the gritty trodden snow with an air of Edward Hopper emptiness. Though all of those visual elements were there, I had to reposition myself over and over again in order to get what I was hoping for, all the while snow was melting on the taking lens of the Rollei. Was it perhaps because of the stinging wind and “ice-rain” that I felt hurried and anxious? Was it because a guy walked into my scene, which for once I didn’t mind? I didn’t know. However, I knew that I was missing that ecstatic experience in North Dakota. But, as is the case with shooting film, there’s no way of knowing what the results will be until the roll is processed. I reached the end of the roll and my patience and called it quits.

I dropped off the roll of Cinestill, and returned to pick up the roll the following Saturday. The negatives looked decent, as did the scans, but also about what I had suspected. The snowy conditions were nice, the color rendition just as good as the images from Fargo, but they didn’t quite have the same punch I had been hoping for. Perhaps this is what it is like shooting Cinestill in the snow rather than rain slicked surfaces. The romance however was not gone, but perhaps reality tempers expectation as happens with all relationships. When the conditions are right again, we’ll giver her a call.

The Take Away:

Do not get complacent. Just because a film worked in a particular manner in one set of conditions, each time is a unique experience. Will I work with this film again? Does Rutger Hauer look sweaty in Blade Runner every second he is on screen up to his, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe” self-eulogy? The answer is yes on both counts. Maybe an active snow storm is not the best atmosphere for this film. As I previously mentioned in Neon: Fargo, there are definitely different kinds of dark. In the environment of a cave, light is seems to be devoured by the rock and absolute darkness. The opposite was true in the case of shooting in the snow. All of that snow reflected much more light than I had expected. I think, had there been only wet reflective surfaces and no snow on the ground, the results would have been more effective and in line with what I envisioned.

This film still has a forgiving latitude. Initially, I felt that the image of the restaurant was far too over exposed, even though the initial scans held good detail in the shadows with the highlights of the brightest street lamps being blown out. In general, my initial reaction was…

“meh.”

However, some patience and adjustments in Photoshop really did produce some good results. I added a layer that I applied a high pass filter to increase edge sharpness, and an additional black and white layer where I pushed the blues and cyans into the shadows and lifted the yellows and magentas into the highlights. This dramatically improved the results. Like - a world of difference. Now, instead of an image that I originally saw as a good lesson in how to fail gracefully, I see an image that is promising and I quite like it. Perhaps I have many other images like this that need attention with a similar open mind.

Before editing

After editing.