Suburban quiet

Before I boarded a Luas from Ranelagh to Sandyford on Thursday evening, and before I photographed its arrival at the station, I turned my lens on Ranelagh village itself with the Luas station offering a good view as it straddles the main road.

I chose a relatively narrow aperture for this shot for two reasons.  Firstly, with lots of pin-point light sources in the frame (street lights, traffic lights, car headlights) a small aperture would create a star-burst effect and make those light sources look more pleasing in the frame.  Secondly, the small aperture would keep detail sharp throughout more of the frame.

Metering the scene was difficult to get right automatically due to all these light sources, some of which (the car headlights for example) were not static in the frame.   Instead I used an automatic metering to give me a starting point for a manual exposure, and through trial and error (by taking a few test shots) settled on the exposure you see above.

I like this frame above the others I shot not only because I think it is the most accurate exposure – in that it looks closest to how the scene appeared to my eye – but also because of the lone car driving towards the camera close to the centre of the frame, and the way in which its headlights appear due to that small aperture.

What I don’t like in the frame is the area of the road directly in front of that car, which is blown out to pure white due to the fact that the road was wet.  If this shot was going to be used as a print, or a competition photograph, both unlikely due to the noise caused by the high ISO, I would try to bring some detail back into that area of the frame, most likely by cloning some of the road nearby.

But this shot is just one for the blog, so my post-processing was more straight forward and just covered the basics – contrast, shadows, highlights and colour temperature.

To be more creative a much slower exposure at ISO 200 and/or f/22 could have been a nice image, with red and white light trails intersecting the frame.  And it would have been less noisy, and probably more useable beyond the blog.  But it would have required a means of keeping the camera steady for the duration of the exposure – a tripod for instance, that was something I didn’t have at the time.  Maybe next time, though.