Night time and twilight photography

Learning outcome P1, P2, P4, P5

Richmond – George Street

Richmond George Street is not only a good place take fantastic pictures of sparkling Christmas lights as the following one to The Quadrant, George Street and Duke Street.

Light painting and still live

some first night pictures

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I was looking for a place where I could create some light painting created by car and bus lights. The objects in the foreground should be ideally sharp and well exposed. Which was not that easy because the parking taxi cars were always slowly pushing ahead. So I changed place.

But there was still something missing to get a better result. The back ground with the iluminated restaurant was too boring to be a more interesting night shoot.

Finally I think I’d found a good place for the spot and also some good objects to fill in the foreground. I used a huge f-stop in order to assure a sharp range of depth of field. From the letter box until the last buildings in the background where sharp enough. Shutter speed was selected to 30 sec to assure that enough vehicles would pass through the picture frame. I like espeacially the first bike at the bike stand which is well exposed. With some post production effects might be some further improvments achievable.

background blur effect

richmond bridge

At Richmond Bridge I was playing a bit around with changing the camera settings in order to create some blured light sources in the background. This bokeh effect can be achieved by using a wide aperture and close manual focus. The choosen out of focus light sources of street lights and car lights look like neat circles in the background of the photograph.

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Aparently my aperture was still not wide enough and I miss some focussed objects in the foreground.

London – Parliament square

At 31.01.2020 I’d been at Parliament Square just to whitness BREXIT amongst leavers when they celebrate the coutdown together with Nigel Farage. To catch the following picture, I used my 50mm lense at its widest aperture f 1.4. The participant in the foreground was in focus and the background light sources and the Union Jak became very blur.

That picture was taken after 11PM, when UK symbolicly left the EU. Maybe the person in the foreground seamed to reflect, whether it was right or not, how knows. Anyway I didn’t use the flash to have the person only in ambient rest light. I might have to adjust brightness in the center slightly.

painting with light