Times Square

Times Square
Originally uploaded by Jörg Dickmann.

This is fantastic! Makes you feel like you are being enclosed in. Great composition!

Don't Drink and Drive

Don't Drink and Drive
Originally uploaded by Andre Blyth.

This is conderful. Very frantic. And has a message which is very hard to get when doing LEs since you're never sure what the final product will actually be.

mong kok nights

mong kok nights
Originally uploaded by rogvon.

This really caught my eye in the group. I love the colors and how busy it is, though its not so abstracted that you don't know what you are looking at. Overall a very cool shot indeed

Feed Issue

Some subscribers (and by some I mean all) might notice that there are random pictures nestled into the feed from last night. This was a mistake by me. I was fiddling with feedburner and switched the PhotoSplicr on with the Group ID inserted. However the PhotoSplicr doesn't support Group IDs so it got random pictures and inserted them instead. I apologize for any problems this might have caused. Rest assured this will not happen again.

Selection from LE Pool: Night shoot St james Square Grimsby (Thanks

Night shoot St james Square Grimsby (Thanks Brassai)
Originally uploaded by cabstar1.

I've deicded that the LE of the Week has gone far too long without a post however. I also thought that a weekly post is a little too demanding for me right now so I figured I'd make a post to the LE of the Week when I could and when I felt a picture need further exposure. Therefore the LE of the Week has now become Selections from LE Pool

My first selection is this the image about by cabstar1. Its hard to get a good black and white long exposure and this one is great! It really draws the viewer in. And it exudes mood everywhere. I simply love it!

My 3rd Night Shoot

Continuing to post my learnings as I journey from daylight into the dark side of night photography.

Went out on my third night excursion last weekend with my old man. 2 Hr trip up in the mountains to an old derelict blast furnace. I was happy with some of the shots I took.

So What Were The Learnings?
1) I realised when I was down there that I had no idea about how to find the North or South celestial pole.... I do now. Click here to find out how to do it for Nth or Sth hemisphere.

2) My new little Xenon torch was the bomb! No colour casts at all and perfect size and power.

3) Getting into a routine with exposure calculations is important (I only left it on 1600 ISO once).

4) Praying to the gods for clouds seems to work.... it was clear when we started shooting then we got perfect cloud cover through the night.

5) Bottle of red wine definitely goes down well for night photography

Contributions from a Newbie Entering the Nocturnal World

Hi Folks

I am a pretty passionate landscape photographer who has just recently taken a step into "the dark side" and started experimenting with night photography. I started blogging about it in my own blog and Otto cajoled me into being a "contributer" to this blog and also writing about my learnings and observations as I enter the nocturnal world.

For those of you that are out there that are "Masters of the night", perhaps you can comment on my posts and help me climb the learning curve a little bit faster.

I've been doing Landscape work for years, mainly seascapes, if you want to see the type of stuff that I do, here's someof my landscape photos on Flickr. I shoot with a Nikon D200, main lens is a Tokina 12-24 and I enjoy Photoshop work as well. So thats me.

My journey into night photography was to push me out of my comfort zone and try something different. So I will be contributing pretty regularly on my learnings over the coming months.

In my first blog I showed the results of my first outing. Here's the first two night shots that I took while experimenting.







I was pretty happy with them and they certainly "got me hooked". After this first excursion out the key issues I immediately had to grapple with were.

1) How the hell do you compose your shot when it's pitch black
2) What's the impact of ultra-long exposures on noise
3) How do you work out exposures when your camera meter only meters to 30sec

The good news is that I have answered all three of these questions pretty quickly.

Answer to number 1) Shoot a test shot at ISO3200 so so you can quickly see the image in your view finder and adjust framing (note: the pictures above were taken only under starlight - no moon at all).

Answer to number 2) I did some pretty extensive noise tests, for the geeks amongst you, you can read the full test results in my blog

Answer to number 3) I think I have a neat little answer to this which I will describe in the next few days.

Stay tuned for quite a few updates over the coming weeks as I get out and experiment with night landscape work.

Brent