talking in photographs part 2      

silent lights        

solving photographic problems

every night i take my dogs out along the river. from day one i have been fascinated by the reflection of the bright street- and city lights in the dark water. it reminds me of Leon Spilliaert's paintings of the seashore in Ostend. i just love that silent muted atmosphere and have always wanted to capture it. 

this is the best that my iPhone could come up with, and i didn't like it very much. i needed a camera with more possibilities.

so when i got my olympus PEN P3 i was really excited and couldn't wait to take it out with the dogs at night....

i had read some books about night photography beforehand though, and knew i would encounter some problems. 

here's how i tried to solve them.

i bought a gorilla pod and fastened it to the steering wheel of my electric scooter. this allows me to use a very long shutter speed without camera shake resulting in blurry images. then i went out and started experimenting. i put my camera on manual mode, used a very small aperture (due to the dark it is almost impossible to focus on anything), put it on 2 seconds delayed shutter release, framed the shot, stepped out of my scooter and reframed it properly, then pressed the shutter and waited.....

this shot was taken at 40mm f/16 ISO 320 8 seconds
it was too dark, so i tried again with different settings

this is the same shot at 25 seconds and a much better representation of my night vision


here are some more of my night shots with the settings i used

53mm f/22 ISO 200 at 60 seconds
slightly post-processed in Lightroom to bring out the color of the shed

40mm f/16 ISO 800 at 15 seconds

some noise reduction applied in Lightroom

40mm f/22 ISO 200 at 50 seconds
pushed the clarity and reduced the noise in Lightroom