A shot at night photography

For the past couple of nights it has been raining and I couldn’t go out. Today for a change, it didn’t rain and it was past midnight when it I just got into the mood of trying some shots. Of course I had couple of spots in mind, but decided to keep one that was close to the house.

I kept saying to myself that all it would need is low shutter speed. Since it was midnight, I might have to go as low as allowed by my camera. Well, it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I had some problems.

First one was with the focus. Since the lens couldn’t get any object in focus due to the way I had framed the picture, I had to resort to manual focus. Due to my corrective lens, I couldn’t figure out whether I had the thing in focus or not, so what you see in the picture is the best guess I could do. Got the meter reading to an acceptable level after slowing down the shutter speed. Was using a tripod due to the shutter speeds, but still I didn’t want to take any chances, so used the remove for the depress. After the 30s interval, the shutter got closed and I was waiting for the preview on the LCD. But to my surprise, it never came and there were some letters blinking in my viewfinder. No matter how long I waited, the thing wouldn’t go off from my viewfinder, unless I depress the shutter release button halfway down. Now I got to go back and refer to the manual.

I learnt so many things in just this first outing and I’m eager to do more rounds 🙂

Here is the photo that I got. Though its not as I wanted it to be, still something to remember for this night 🙂

Foster City at Night

3 thoughts on “A shot at night photography

  1. What happened ..just one pic this time ?? 🙂 Definitely needs improvement ..kind of lost too much in darkness on this one.Doesn't look easy though taking shots@night ! Good effort..But as you said..back to manual for night shots !

  2. @Ravi: I guess my timing wasn't that great either. It was midnight when I shot that and no matter how much I messed around, couldn't get the exposure I wanted. Add to that the constant stopping of the camera's long exposure compensation time. I had to go back to the manual to figure out what the camera was doing after the exposure and now I know 🙂

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