City Lights

Back to earth today after yesterday’s photo of the Space Shuttle Endeavor flying over Dublin on its way to the International Space Station.  Incidentally, that photograph proved to be very popular – to be fair I think mainly because the event itself was – so I feel the pressure is on me a little bit today!  I’ve chosen to post the photograph I took after the shuttle had passed, when I turned my lens on the Dublin city lights that lay beneath me.

A word at this juncture about a lens characteristic called “bokeh”.  Often with photographic lenses, a primary concern is the sharpness of the lens.  But the aesthetics of a photograph, particularly where you shoot with a shallow depth of field, can be strongly affected by the bokeh of the lens.  To quote Ken Rockwell:

“sharpness is what happens at the point of best focus; bokeh is what happens away from the point of best focus”

Wikipedia is probably more precise in its definition:

“bokeh refers to the æsthetic quality of point-of-light sources in an out-of-focus area of an image”

I’ve really never experimented with this aspect of an image too much and just accept whatever the lens will offer when I focus and choose an aperture appropriate to the subject and/or the lighting.  However on Wednesday night, having put my 17-50mm lens on the camera, I put the camera on the roof of the car for a moment and when I went to pick it up I noticed, thanks to Live View mode which I had turned on, that the lights of the city made for a very pleasing image when they were “out of focus”.

I experimented with this a little and as I did so I also noticed that from certain angles the roof of the car was reflecting the lights in a narrow line, almost like a horizon.

I positioned my camera to take advantage of this and brought the point of focus near to the edge of the roof to bring some sharpness into that line, while keeping the city lights behind totally out of focus.

I had to handhold the camera to keep the right point-of-view and with a 1/3 second exposure even the point of the focus is a little blurred, but I think this image still has a nice look to it.  The roof of the car also reflects some of the colour in the sky and that helps the colour tone of the whole image.

Incidentally, I also took an in focus shot of the city lights but it just didn’t compare – I will try to get that particular photo in the future but I need to visit earlier in the evening while there’s still the remnants of sunlight left in the sky.

For now though this shot will do nicely.