Today’s post follows up on yesterday’s post in two respects – firstly I promised to show you the scene that greeted my camera when I turned it away from Sydney Opera House while photographing around that area at dusk last week, and that is what you see above. More on that in a moment after I tell you that, sadly for me I didn’t win an Irish Blog Award this year, but it helps that I lost out to a very deserving winner – a blog that I read on a regular basis and a blogger that I’ve been communicating with on Twitter over the last few months, so I’m thrilled for Red Mum who won the Best Photo Blog award last night in Galway. As for this blog – well there’s always next year!
I suppose I can console myself with the fact that I’ve been getting to photograph places like Circular Quay, which is not only home to two of the most recognizable structures in the world, but also must be one of the most aesthetic wharfs in the world, with its back drop of well-lit modern skyscrapers.
Having photographed the Opera House last week, as the sun was setting more and more and the sky was getting darker and darker I turned my attention to this back drop, and essentially repeated the same process as I had gone through with the Opera House – taking regular exposures, adjusting the shutter speed as the light fell, and looking for a balance between the ambient and artificial light that worked for me. The changes in light seemed to accelerate as time went on, or perhaps it’s just that with so little light left in the sky, and small change at all was more significant than it had been earlier.
With different light sources at play – the office buildings and street lights rather than the railing and indoor lighting of the Opera House that lit that photo – the variables were different and so too the shutter speed.
I was still at f/8, but now it wasn’t until the shutter speed opened out to 4 seconds that I began to like the results. I took pictures before and after this, and the following one, taken a few minutes later, had a shutter speed of 5 seconds. I like one thing in particular about it, which I suspect you’ll spot straight away.
In case it’s not obvious, what I like about this one is the plane at the top of the frame, which was coming from the airport and went out of frame just before the exposure finished. Had I spotted it in the sky sooner I would have tried closing the aperture right down and trying a 20s exposure to get the full trail from its lights, but sadly that wasn’t to be.
What I don’t like about this second image (and why it’s the second image in this post and not the main one) is that the balance is wrong – I felt that 5 seconds was the limit of shutter speed I could use before the artificial lights got totally blown out, but not enough to bring up the light levels in the darker sky. There wasn’t much I could do about this – opening up the aperture for the sky would do the same for the lights – similarly increasing the ISO. It meant really that the ideal time for this type of photography had passed. I did take a few more shots with a different slant before I went – I may post one or more of those again here, but tomorrow I’ve lined up something which is in contrast to these city shots, so stay tuned for that.
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