I tend to spend Thursday evenings a little differently to other evenings, as my wife takes the car to go to choir practice and I find my way home via public transport. Depending on my mood this will involve a walk and a bus or a luas and a walk, and if I’m lazy I may replace the walk with a taxi. I often bring my camera with me, and last night, having hopped off the Luas in Dundrum to get a taxi to Stepaside I took a detour off the main road until I was looking at the newest part of Dundrum Town Centre. With time to kill, and a camera bag over my shoulder, I started taking some photographs.
I came away with five different shots, at least three of which I will post here over the next few days. Because this was an exercise in some night photography, I took more than five frames. Getting a night time shot right first time is near impossible in my experience, especially when you are trying to include light trails in the frame (as I was for all but one of the shots). That said, I didn’t do too bad – my five shots came from 37 frames – not a bad average for this type of photography.
The first shot I aimed to get is what you see above. It is the newest phase of Dundrum, and the thought to photograph it first struck me on Wednesday night as Aoife and I walked down to The Counter, which is a nice burger place that is just in the centre of the frame (next to Nandos whose sign you might be able to see in the shot). On Wednesday night there was a fog over this part of the centre that I thought would photograph well, but I had no camera. Last night I had a camera, but no fog. Typical.
Still, it does photograph well, although not going the HDR route with this shot meant it was always going to be difficult, if not impossible, to retain detail in the highlights. That is why there are blown out areas in the shot, but hopefully you’ll forgive them.
The exposure is 13 seconds, which I achieved by keeping the ISO low (I thought I was at 200, but turns out it was 250) and the aperture small (f/22 – bonus is the star-burst effect on the point sources of light, though there aren’t many of those in this particular frame).
That long exposure gives me the light trails on the road – I tried first without light trails and the bottom of the frame was just a bit empty. I was baffled when I saw how the light trails were being reproduced – all those squiggles look like drivers were drunk. I realised as I watched the cars during the next exposure that many of the light trails are reflections in the car bodies of the street lights and other lights in the background, and the curved nature of a car makes them go a bit funky. The dominant red, white and yellow straight lines are what you would expect – headlights, brakelights and indicators.
After getting this shot, I moved 50 yards to my right, and this time went with a wider aperture and faster shutter. More on that shot tomorrow.
One of the things I love about shooting digital is how easy it is to take a “test shot” to determine what exposure I want for the keeper. I dial the f-stop down to 2.8 and the ISO up all the way to 3200 so I can take a quick shot (or two, or more) to determine the amount of light I want to capture. Then I roll the ISO down to 200 (count the clicks) and roll the f-stop up to the max (count the clicks) then roll the shutter speed by the same number of clicks. Since reciprocity isn’t much of an issue with digital, the resulting image’s histogram is pretty much the same as the test shot, except for the light trails of course.
UI note: As there are no comments to this entry yet, your blog says “No comments” but doesn’t have a link to *leave a comment*. I would change the text to say “Leave a comment” when no one has left a comment yet.
Hi ronan, nice image – just wondering do you use a tripod for the night shots
JC – That’s a good technique – thanks for sharing it. It can be a pain having to wait 30 seconds for a test shot and as you suggested, a 1/8th of a second exposure at ISO 3200 f/2.8 is gonna give a pretty good idea on digital of what a 30 second exposure at ISO 200, f/22 is gonna look like (if my maths is right!). Great tip.
Also regarding the comments, thanks for pointing that out – I’ve fixed it now.
Craig – glad you like the image. If I plan ahead I will use a tripod, but in this case I rested the camera on a pillar across the road from the shopping centre. It was reasonably flat and level – I used the camera strap to keep the lens level also.