Saturday, March 6, 2010

Evening and Night shots – My Experiments

I thought of writing this after I recently did a very brief photo-shoot from my 4th floor balcony one evening.

I was just fooling around with my camera when Suni pointed that there is a beautiful sunset outside. I had 12-60mm on camera and grabbed my 50-200mm (100-400mm 35 mm equivalent)  as well,  just in case. In the hindsight, it was a good decision!

This photo-shoot was also unique in the sense that this was the first time I experimented using full manual exposure mode.

This is one of the shots I took with 50-200. Before I took this one, I had taken a few more shots with in Aperture Priority Mode and matrix and center-weighted metering. I felt that that the camera was underexposing by at least 2 stops when I used Aperture priority with either of the metering modes. So I then put my camera in Spot metering mode and took the reading (shot couple of test shots) with direct focus on the sun. I found that the exposure was better, but I still felt that there was at least half a stop or 1 stop of under exposure. So I put the camera in manual mode and adjusted the aperture and shutter so that I compensated for half stop under exposure.

Here are the result. I think E-30 did the rest. I felt these are amazing result. I kept the white-balance in AUTO. The red of the sun is as perfect as I was looking at it with naked eye.

Evening and Night Shots

I also took few shots in various angles so that I can crop them as I want them to be. Here are the results. The wide ones are taken with 12-60mm. But the method used to arrive at the manual exposure values is same.

Evening and Night Shots

 

Evening and Night Shots

 

I then waited for sun to go down and shot the hill which looked hazy and surreal. I converted these into monochrome in Photoshop and added more grain [the noise on E-30 @ ISO200 is zero unfortunately! ;-)] to get the effect. I love the layered effect I got. These were shot in both aperture priority and manual mode and as you can see, there is some difference in the exposure values, however that is more due to the darkness falling rapidly than anything else. I could as well have shot these in A-priority. But for Sun in the picture, I needed to full manual control.

Evening and Night Shots

 

Evening and Night Shots

 

In the same vein, I tried this shot of the crescent moon with the buildings. I struggled a lot to get the exposure right. The moon was going behind the clouds rapidly, and I got this shot just in the nick of time.

Evening and Night Shots

Moreover this was 50-200mm handheld. I rested the barrel of the lens on the barrier of my balcony and hand held with IS-1 on and Live View On. I set the exposure manually based on the experiments in A-Priority mode.

These are just some of my experiments….Hope you enjoyed them.

 

CIAO!

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