Nights gone by

A confluence of events led to this posting. After a co-worker asked me about shooting pictures at night, and a friend asked why I haven't posted anything in forever, this is the result.

These four pictures were shot way back when in May 2010. I got bored one clear, cloudless night, so I decided to take a walk down the Pike with my camera to see what I could see. While not the best examples of nighttime photography, they do show what happens when you leave the shutter open for 30 seconds or more.

All of these are shot with the camera rated at ISO 100 (the measure of how fast the camera's sensor soaks in the light - in this case, slowly), with the aperture set at f/32 (the smallest possible) and the shutter speed at 30 seconds or more. It goes without saying I was using a tripod.

I kind of like this first one for a very simple reason: The exposure was long enough for me to make it look like the traffic signals are showing red, yellow and green all at the same time.


Shot from a very low angle (some of the people walking by looked at me a little funny as I was sitting on the sidewalk), this is just a long shot looking east down the Pike. The orange lights are courtesy of a Metro Bus.

Looking west, these next two shots are similar except in the number of cars that passed by my lens.

I really kinda like the ghosty effect of the Miata, it kind of looks like it's going to just disappear into the other car.

One of the things I love the most about shooting at night is that you can actually put a real sense of motion into a still picture. Just by cranking down the aperture and leaving the shutter open a little longer you can bring the streets to life in the dark.

Let there be light…but not too much and also in the right temperature

Somewhere in the vague, dark recesses of my memory is an 11th grade chemistry lecture from Mr. Chas Bowman about how different colors of light have different “temperatures” along the Kelvin scale. This same concept has popped up again a couple of times in the intervening years – when friends were making a movie and, despite being pretty smart themselves, forgot this and had to spend $10k to rent lights for their shoot; in my college astronomy class; and so on.

It came up again Sunday night when a deliciously interesting looking fog rolled into A-Town (and the rest of NOVA/DC area as well). Hoping to capture the phenomena, I headed out to the veranda with the camera and stick (monopod). This is what I got:

Yeah, it’s unsteady, yellow and just plain ugly. I post it here only as an object lesson, not an object of beauty. It was shot with the camera on auto white balance at an aperture of f2.8 and a 1 second exposure. I don’t recommend this method for night pictures, but go ahead if you want, don't say I didn't warn you.

Then I remembered reading in my brand new, just arrived from Amazon last Friday “How to use my DSLR” book that my camera could easily adjust itself to differing light conditions. I also got my tripod and remote trigger out for obvious reasons. This, is the first attempt at playing with light temps:

Better, but not quite. It was shot at an aperture of f2.8, a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds, and a temp of 10,000K.

I won’t bore you with the 50 or so intervening pictures where I dropped the temp one setting at a time and played with the shutter speed. Instead I’ll jump right to end where the camera eventually ended up set at 2,500K (the minimum). This finally got rid of most of the ugly yellows, although some other colors crept in, the greenish-blues at the bottom center and right of the next three pictures, for instance. But what’s a guy to do? Seriously, this is a real question and if anyone has an answer that’d be great. kthxbye.

Once I got the light temp figured out, the aforementioned 2,500K, I started playing with the shutter speed and aperture. This is the result, shot at f11 with a 20 second exposure:

And, finally, these two (f14 for 30 seconds) with their wispy clouds, long trails of headlights and taillights, and beautiful fade from misty white to azure through cobalt blue and then finally to the inky black sky, well, I’m pretty satisfied with them.

I didn’t get around to it, mainly because it was kinda coldish, near midnight and I had to get up for work in about six hours, but I really would have liked to try a really long shot. Something where I left the shutter open for two or three or even five minutes with the aperture really stepped down to f32 to see what I could get.

Also, I have to wonder what my neighbors, any who might have seen me that is, thought about me being out on my balcony with a camera on a tripod late into the evening? Thankfully I didn’t have a telephoto lens on. That could have been awkward.