Here I have some shots that I took outdoors at night. My first few are fireworks. It is very difficult to capture stunning firework images without the use of a tripod, however I feel I have obtained some acceptable results. For each shot below my camera was set to 1/13sec, f/5.6, ISO 400. Had I been using a tripod I could have used a much longer shutter speed to capture more of the explosion’s movement.
New Years Eve - Newcastle City Centre
My next image is actually a manipulation of the two photographs above plus a further four (all of which I shot). Having placed the photographs on top of one another and in my desired orientation using Photoshop, all that’s left to do is to set each layers “Blend Mode” to “Lighten” apart from the bottom layer; this creates an image that appears to have many more fireworks in it than it actually does.
My final fireworks shot was taken with the same settings as mentioned above and is a single shot of multiple explosions.
Next I decided to experiment with light trails; this is the use of long shutter speeds to capture any light moving across the frame as a stream. One of the most popular ways to use this technique is by shooting cars head and tail lights. This is quite a technical process as the shutter speed has to be long enough to capture the passage of light (or multiple lights) through the frame, yet the aperture and ISO need to be set so that the rest of the image remains correctly exposed (or not exposed at all).
First attempt – Taken from a window at home of three cars driving past.
If not enough cars drive past to leave a sufficiently attractive image, Photoshop can be used to layer multiple shots together.
Taken from a Pedestrian overpass along the Carrington Spur (Ashton-on-Mersey, Sale)
For my final experiment with light trails I aimed the camera at myself, shone a torch back towards the lens and wrote my signature in the air. I had to flip this shot horizontally in order for it to be the right way round and I feel I’ve captured quite an impressive example of the technique.
My signature (M L Moore)
Shooting buildings at night can be quite complicated. Getting the exposure right can be difficult as the lit areas are extremely bright and dark areas come out very under exposed. Below is an example of a flood lit building where naked lamps aren’t actually visible. In this situation, the camera TTL metering system works quite well at calculating the correct exposure settings to use. Setting my cameras white balance to tungsten seems to have corrected much of the orange haze visible when shooting with the daylight setting.
Sale Town Hall
Next, brightly lit buildings such as the take-away and DIY shop below completely overpower the shot. The store fronts are so bright that correctly exposing for them severely under exposes their surroundings. Correctly exposing for the surroundings would leave the stores ridiculously over exposed. The type of lights that are mainly used in these situations are fluorescent and therefore setting my cameras white balance to fluorescent will alter any colour casting.
When shooting scenes which contain small bright naked lights, overexposing these lights is the only way correctly expose for the rest of the scene.
The photograph below is an example of a shot over a city/town.
Taken from Werneth Low, Stockport – Looking towards Hyde
The shot below is the road outside my house. The vapour street lamps give the image and extremely orange colour cast.
For my final experiment I decided to take photographs of candles at night. My first image is of my girlfriend Lindsay behind two homemade lanterns. The very low colour temperature of fire, combined with the red colouring of one of the lanterns turns Lindsay’s face bright red even when using tungsten balance.
For my very last shot I placed lanterns on different branches of trees and correctly exposed for the lanterns; this give the illusion that they are floating around in the pitch black.
