Blog Assignment #1! Night Photography

I've been stuck in a creative rut lately. I feel like so much of life gets in the way of learning. So, I decided to change it! Dominique of D. Long Photography and I have teamed up for weekly blog assignments to keep our butts motivated to learn. This past week's assignment was learning how to photograph at night using only available light (no flash!). I have NEVER done a night shoot before and I was eager to dive in. Cara and Patrick graciously (and patiently) let me use them as my guinea pig models. (Thanks Cara and P!)

So, this is the picture I am submitting for this assignment. It was one of the first that we tried and took a couple of takes to get it right. My f-stop was 4.5, ISO was 1250 and shutter was 1/4 sec. The hard part for me was working around the crowd on the boardwalk. I forgot to bring my shutter release cable so I was working with the 2 sec timer and trying to coordinate the crowd movement through the photo was a challenge. I love the movement that this photo offers.

One thing I noticed is with night photography you plan out your shots so much more which is a good and bad thing for me. So much of my style is trying to capture the emotion and connection of people. It is very difficult for your subjects to make that connection when they are trying to hold still for the camera to minimize subject blur while the shutter is open. You can't take advantage of them having an intimate and genuine laugh together because they would be one big blur in the photo. The advantage to it is I think I only took about 20 pictures in a 2-hour shoot which means the quality of each individual picture was better and there were less to toss out and less to edit. So here are a few more to show you...

This one below I probably could have lowered my ISO down a bit. There was much more available light here than any of the other locations. I have a habit when I am on manual mode to forget that it is a 3-way relationship between ISO, shutter and aperture. Usually the ISO just fades to the background for me once I set it.

This last one I think just might be my favorite. There is so much gorgeous light at night that I never noticed before. The reflection off the water gave the greatest light source and Cara and Patrick have this red glow to them from the lights of the ferris wheel directly behind me. It looks magical to me.

So we are hoping that these blog assignments will inspire others to either try them out, or share what has worked for them. I would have loved to have had the time to test my camera and see what manipulating the shutter or aperture would have done creatively for these shots, or how low I really could have gotten with the ISO. If I remember right, I started trying with 400 and the shutter was open way to long for Cara and Patrick to try and hold still for so I bumped it up from there. I feel like I know what the results would be on the streetlamps if I pushed the aperture up higher to get those starlights, but when I am in the midst of a shoot, I always forget to just try it out to see what happens!