The Dark Hedges at Night

Building a Photograph with Light

This photograph was taken at the Dark Hedges in County Antrim on 5 November 2022. The avenue of beech trees has become one of Northern Ireland’s most recognisable locations, appearing as the Kingsroad in HBO’s Game of Thrones, but on this night our group of five photographers had come to photograph it in a very different way.

The five of us were staying around Tollymore in County Down. The others had booked an Airbnb, while I was travelling in my campervan and staying outside their accommodation. With sunset coming early in November, at around 16:40, we travelled to the Dark Hedges after darkness had already fallen with a very different kind of photograph in mind.

Rather than relying on the available light, we wanted to illuminate the famous avenue of beech trees ourselves.

Six Lights, Five Photographers and a Lot of Experimenting

Between us we had six RGB LED panel lights, each containing 520 LEDs. Four were mine and Chris had brought another two. We lined up our tripods and began working out not only the camera exposures, but the position, brightness and colour of each light.

It became a group effort. We would make an exposure, review the results on the backs of our cameras and then move the lights again. We tried to conceal the panels behind tree trunks and along the banks at either side of the road so that the trees appeared illuminated without the light sources themselves becoming part of the photograph.

We experimented with different intensities and combinations of red, green and blue. Some trees looked particularly good under blue light, others under green or red, but as the scene developed I began to realise that colour wasn’t going to be the final answer. With so many coloured lights illuminating the avenue, it was beginning to look far more processed than I wanted. I hadn’t come to the Dark Hedges to make it look like the venue of a ’90s rave.

I already knew that if I could create the photograph I had in my head, the finished image would have to be monochrome.

Putting Someone Among the Trees

The Dark Hedges avenue stretches for around 150 metres, but I wasn’t interested in photographing the entire avenue or making a particularly wide composition. There was a more enclosed view through the trees that I wanted, concentrating on their twisted trunks and interlocking branches with only a glimpse of what lay beyond.

As the five of us studied the composition, we agreed that the photograph would benefit from having a person standing among the trees. None of us was particularly eager to become the model. I was firmly in shooting mode and made the convenient argument that my black coat wouldn’t show particularly well anyway, so Keith volunteered to take his place farther down the avenue.

It was a cold November night, long after daylight had disappeared, and Keith ended up being there for quite some time. He would hold his position for around 30 seconds at a time, then move around to warm himself before getting back into position for another exposure.

When One Exposure Wasn’t Enough

As we continued shooting, I realised that the static LED panels weren’t dispersing light beneath the trees in the way I had imagined. Parts of the trunks were illuminated beautifully, but much of the bark and the undersides of the branches remained lost in darkness.

That was when the photograph became considerably more complicated.

I set up my intervalometer and allowed the camera to make one 20-second exposure after another while remaining fixed on the tripod. I then began moving through the avenue with a handheld torch, directing its beam upwards and painting additional light onto the bark and the undersides of the branches.

Wearing black became an advantage. As long as I kept moving, stayed between the camera and the torch where possible and concealed the end of the torch itself, I could move left and right and progressively farther down the avenue without remaining in one place long enough to become a significant part of the exposure.

Instead of trying to illuminate everything in a single frame, I could concentrate on different sections of the trees during different exposures. I was effectively building the lighting of the photograph piece by piece.

Painting with Light, Then Painting with Exposures

I didn’t begin the final edit until about a week after the shoot. Lightroom was, and still is, where I felt most comfortable editing photographs, but what I had captured at the Dark Hedges required something more. To turn all of those individual exposures into the photograph I had envisioned, I needed to work in Photoshop and step outside my normal comfort zone.

I loaded the exposures into Photoshop as a stack and initially tried the automated features. The result didn’t come close to what I felt was the full potential contained within the individual photographs.

So I began building the image manually.

Using layer masks and the Brush tool, I worked through the stack and selectively painted in the strongest parts of different exposures. One frame might contain better illumination on a particular trunk, while another held the light I wanted beneath a branch or farther down the avenue. Keith appeared in several of the original exposures, allowing me to retain a frame in which he had remained still during the long exposure.

The final photograph therefore wasn’t created by simply pressing a button and allowing software to combine the images. Every element came from photographs made from the same fixed camera position that night, with the lighting physically created among the trees and the strongest illuminated areas subsequently brought together by hand.

The Dark Hedges in Monochrome

Removing the colour finally allowed everything to come together. The competing reds, greens and blues disappeared, leaving the photograph to become about light, shadow, texture and the extraordinary shapes of the beech trees.

The lone figure gives a sense of scale, but the trees remain the dominant presence. What appears in the finished photograph as a quiet moment beneath an illuminated avenue was, in reality, the result of five photographers experimenting in the darkness, six RGB lights hidden around the trees, repeated long exposures, torchlight, a very cold and patient Keith, and considerably more Photoshop work than I was accustomed to doing.

Of all the photographs I have created, this remains one of the most complicated, calculated and interesting shoots I have undertaken. It pushed me beyond both the way I normally photographed a scene and the way I normally edited one — and that process became as much a part of this image as the Dark Hedges themselves.