The Irish Blog Awards are on tonight in Galway and I am proud to be one of the five finalists in the Best Photo Blog category. I would love to be able to go to the awards, but sadly I’m not going to make it. I am 11 time zones away (10 time zones from tomorrow – the clocks change tonight in Ireland) in beautiful Sydney, which I hope is an acceptable excuse for missing the awards. I’m here on a business trip, but there’s been some down time too – and an opportunity to take some photographs of my favourite building in the world.
I spent an hour and a half taking photographs around Circular Quay a few nights ago. Over the coming few days I hope to get to take photographs further afield – Manly, the Blue Mountains and beyond, and the Coogee to Bondi walk are all on my itinerary if I can fit them in to my spare time. But I do want to share a few of my Circular Quay images in the meantime.
I managed to bring a tripod with me on this trip (and of course my D700) so I was well equipped for some evening and night time photography, and having fallen in love with the Opera House on my first visit to Sydney five years ago, I was always going to photograph that first.
I arrived down at Circular Quay at about 6.30pm – almost an hour before I took the photo above – and the sky was still bright as the sun was only beginning to set. That allowed me time to get myself set up, and wait for the ambient light to fall so that it would balance nicely with the artificial lights in, on and around the Opera House. I knew that I would have a very tight window in which this balance would be maintained, and so I wanted to be ready to go when it presented itself.
The ambient light was constantly changing, so my approach was, having established the composition I wanted for the photo, to take shots regularly, and as the light fell to open up my shutter speed to compensate, and at some point I’d get a nice balance between the ambient light (which I was exposing for using my shutter speed) and the fixed intensity of the artificial lights, which would be change relative to the ambient in my final exposure as I changed shutter speed.
The image I ended up liking the best is above, and at that stage my shutter speed was 1.3 seconds, so my tripod was essential.
Less than three minutes earlier, with a shutter speed of 0.8s, I captured the following image:
The differences between these two images are subtle, but if you look closely you’ll see that the extra half a second that the shutter was open in the top image allows the light from the artificial light sources – the railing, those inside the Opera House, and those lighting the exterior – to register more on the overall exposure and some areas of darkness are lifted a little more. The sky exposure is much the same because it had darkened by about two thirds of a stop over those three minutes, and the extra 2/3rds of shutter compensates for that.
Photography at this time of night is a bit like balancing ambient light and flash, except that the artificial light sources being continuous (and not instantaneous like flash is) means they are affected by shutter speed as well as aperture.
Having captured a frame I was happy with, it was time to turn my attention elsewhere, with the city lights behind me beginning to look really good. More on that (and news of who won the blog award) tomorrow. In the meantime good luck to my fellow finalists. I recommend you check out their blogs:
May the best photo blog win!
Love the pics, lucky you. I’ll get there sometime and good luck tonight to you too