I dont obviously have the authority to comment much about the dos and donts in photography as all of what I do is self taught but nothing that I earned from any professional or academic institution, but I guess I can share my experiences. A lot of times I have noticed that we mainly enjoy using bulb mode to capture red trailing tail lights of cars in the city for those artistic night shots. But the one thing I learned about this mode is that it can address so many challenges that we face as photographers for our night shots. All you need is a good tripod that will keep your camera intact with no slightest movement, unfortunately a monopod is not good enough as there will always be that camera shake in one way or another. Better still if you do not have a tripod like myself you can improvise. You can steadily hold your camera on a flat surface as it can be seen on the front shot of my house in one of the pictures I have posted. Or pin down the camera on the wall facing whatever subject you want to capture. So you dont necessarily have to wait for a new tripod to start working. I remember my good friend Thalefang Charles was once surprised to find my D4 scratched heavily at the bottom after a few months of buying it because I always have to do some industrious shots for those elevated angles from time to time. Finally, I know that a lot of times photographers are always worried about the ISO performance of their cameras when it comes to night photography so that they could ramp them up. To be honest I am not a fan of high ISO as pictures can get so grainy and ultimately be useless to a certain degree especially if you wanted to use them commercially or colours will not be as crisp but tend to fade when shot at high ISO. So I always try to keep my ISO as low as possible on any shot I take but rather control aperture and shutter speed which will allow for that natural light. Unless I dont have a choice but to ramp it up at the UB stadium at an evening football match. Anyway going back to BULB mode, a lot of times we will be shooting stationery subjects at night so I mostly keep my ISO very low then compensate for light with the super slow shutter on BULB mode. In the CBD pictures that I posted for example, my ISO was set at 320 and the aperture set at f7.1 then of course very steady hands to avoid that shake. The beauty about it is that because the ISO and aperture are fairly low the over exposure is very limited hence a good perspective of the buildings with no harsh lights. In terms of the shutter speed at bulb mode, well, for me its a hit or miss as I will try a few shots at different exposures. Some I will hold on the the shutter for a while but eventually something decent will come out.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 20:00:05 +0000
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