A beacon in the night

Your photography friends know you as @50mmfilm, and through your photos, you tell a story by capturing just the right moment. You are Thien D. Nguyen.

Nguyen is a film guy, a purist in a sense, who resisted going digital.

“I felt I was the last person to switch over and transition into digital,� Nguyen said of his passion for the technical aspects of photography.

When Nguyen learned to make pictures, he learned on film, which means he worked tirelessly to get exposures correct in a single frame. Of his process, he said, “I close my eyes and envision the photo I want to capture.� He calculates his environment, his subject and his tools to create one frame at a time, and then pushes to make each picture better than the previous one.

Nguyen was first introduced to photography as a young child when his mother brought old film cameras for him to play with.

This picture of the night sky is a 30-second exposure made before sunrise using a Canon 7D and processed using Lightroom.

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