Grand Canal Theatre & Dock

As I photographed the Grand Canal Theatre from across the dock at about 10pm on Saturday night the whole area suddenly lit up as the red sticks and the piazza outside the theatre were illuminated.  Any thoughts I might have had of going home, after 40 minutes of photographing the area, were quickly gone and I found myself returning to many of the vantage points I had earlier shot from to retake images which were enhanced by the lights, especially now that the ambient light levels had dropped considerably.  What follows are some of the images that I captured, and a brief overview of how I adjusted for the light as it fell.

I had brought a tripod with me, but left it in the boot of the car, which was parked a 5 minute stroll away on Barrow Street.  The tripod was there as a backup if I found that I couldn’t get sharp handheld shots, but I really didn’t want to use it.  Not for any technical reason, but because it would draw unnecessary attention to what I was doing.  While I was in a public space, I believe the area is within the control of the Dublin Docklands Authority, and it’s possible (in fact, probable) that they have some restrictions on commercial photography in the area.  I wasn’t engaged in commercial photography, but I didn’t want to have to convince a security guard of that if I didn’t have to.  (It’s worth saying that I did have authority from the theatre to photograph the building from the outside if I wished, so all was above board).

Without a tripod, I had three options for tracking the falling light levels – I could open up the aperture, I could slow down the shutter speed, and I could increase the ISO. There was no easy way for me to add light via the use of flash – to illuminate the area would require lots of big lights. I adjusted these three parameters in that order, starting to increase the ISO only when my shutter speed was at my hand-holding limit, it having been slowed down only when the aperture was as wide as I wished it to get for depth-of-field reasons, or as wide as the lens would go, depending on the shot.

I had one other trick up my sleeve too to help with these low light photographs – my fisheye lens.

Why did this help? Firstly, it has virtually infinite depth of field, even at its widest aperture of f/2.8, so I could maintain sharpness throughout the image in lower light than with any other lens.  Secondly, due to its wide angle – 10.5mm – it has more tolerance for a slower shutter speed (remembering that the rule of thumb for hand-holdable shutter speeds is that the limit is 1/focal length, so that would drop from 1/25s to 1/10s with the change from my 24-70mm lens to the fisheye.  Also, creatively speaking it gave me a different view on the space, and the wider angle allowed me (obviously) to capture wider views of the area.  And I found the area forgiving of the circular distortion that the lens introduces.

The biggest problem with using this lens on the D700 was that it put the D700 into DX mode (as it’s designed for the smaller sensor of the DX cameras like the D300) and that made framing difficult.  I overcame this by framing using Live Mode.

Before I left the area completely I crossed the bridge to the other side of the dock to get some (admittedly distorted) wide angle views of Grand Canal Dock.

My last frame of the evening was an attempt to overcome this distortion by using a more central composition, as lines that run through the centre of the fisheye lens stay straight.  This shot, helped by the reflections in the still water, was taken from the bridge on Ringsend Road:

Update: A reader asked in the comments if it was possible to correct the distortion from the fisheye in software, which it is, but is something I hadn’t the chance to do on the photos in this post before publishing them here.  To illustrate though here’s that last photo having gone through a very quick and dirty transformation in Photoshop to try to straighten out those curved edges (and with a more appropriate crop).  It’s a little blurry because I took the 900×600 pixel version to quickly illustrate this, and so it’s effectively resized up, but you get the idea…