Luas bridge at Dundrum

I am a fan of night time shots taken in urban areas, even if taking them often requires lugging a tripod around (though I’ve been known to use a bin, or even a car roof, to keep the camera steady enough on occasion).  The payoff is in getting a shot which looks quite different to what the human eye sees, often due to how the camera brings out colours or light trails in the long exposures that night time photography requires.

It’s not easy to get night time exposures correct, and this is especially true when photographing urban scenes.  One of the issues that arises is purely logistical – using long shutter speeds of the order of 30 seconds slows the whole photography down, and there’s a lot that can happen in that 30 seconds to ruin your frame.  I once stood on O’Connell Street for a good 25 minutes trying to get a night time shot of the GPO, which required a 20 second exposure, and failed to get a single frame that didn’t have the GPO obscured partly or fully by one or more bus.

Also, because the whole process is slow, you are less likely to take lots of frames, and so run the risk of coming away with a set of images, that when you look at them on the computer later, will all be shown to have at least one fatal flaw.

Another complication particular to urban scenes is metering for scenes which contain lots of street lights or car headlights.  The scientific approach requires careful spot metering and appropriate compensation of the metered exposure using experience and good judgement.  The less scientific, but more common, approach requires the use of those two experimental concepts upon which many great discoveries have been built: trial, and error.

I default to the latter approach more often than not, but again, this takes time.  My Nikon D300 will take 30 seconds to take a 30 second exposures (the modern cameras are good that way!), but will take another 20 seconds to run a noise reduction algorithm on the shot before it allows me take a follow-up shot (the modern cameras are not so good that way!).  So a trial and error approach to determining exposure can require 5 minutes to take 5 different frames.

And then there’s the problem that, having tied down the exposure, you start to take what you hope is a good frame only to have someone park with their headlights shining straight into your lens for the entire duration of the exposure.

So you might wonder, how does anyone get a good night time shot?  Persistance, luck and good timing have a lot to do with it.  But if you’re willing also to accept that urban night time shots need not achieve “perfection” in terms of exposure and dynamic range, you’ll find you can get close enough with some practice.

Take my photograph of the junction beneath the Luas bridge in Dundrum, not far from where I live.  There are blown highlights all over the frame – the junction is littered with traffic lights, there were cars coming from all four directions, there are numerous street lights – all of these light sources pollute the exposure and force my sensor to produce pure white pixels, which is, generally, not a good thing.  But I can’t stop traffic, I can’t expose for these highlights (and so underexpose the rest of the frame), I can’t compress the dynamic range using artificial light, and I can’t realistically take a HDR shot due to the constant movement.  So I just have to live with it.

Where those light sources are static, I can make the blob of pure white that results look a little more aesthetic by using the smallest aperture I can, which will, due to the way the shutter opens, give them a star-burst look.  Hopefully these are pleasing enough to the eye for you to not notice that the top left corner of the frame (which was close to a street light over my head) is unnecessarily blown out, or that the flare from the light sources has highlighted that my lens was not as clean as it should have been.

Hopefully what you do see is that this shot of Dundrum’s iconic bridge is made a little bit more interesting by being taken at night.