Modified 3-Sep-09
Created 3-Sep-09
66 photos
These photos are a collection of hand held night shots that I started shooting while traveling downtown on the bus. After shooting some test shots on the bus I realized that the difficulties of shooting hand held on a moving bus at night could probably be overcome with the right shooting strategies. The trick to shooting in this situation was to always brace myself against the buses wall or a post, hold the camera firmly while holding my breath and then rapidly squeeze off a few shots. While shooting street scenes I would brace myself against a light pole or tree. On some shoots I'll take my Manfrotto carbon-fiber monopod fitted with a Giottos NH-1001 ball head.
As a general rule I prefer to shoot with either short telephoto or wide angle lenses, but for hand held night shooting I chose to shoot with ultra wide angle lenses. The two primary reasons are; the dramatic visual effect you get with ultra wides, and the problems of camera movement that comes from shooting at very slow shutter speeds is minimized when you shoot with wide angle lenses. To avoid auto-focus problems in these dark locations I manually set the lens focus point to infinity, and because wide angle lenses have a very broad depth of field (even at a near wide open F-stop) most objects that are just a few feet away will still be in focus.
In my initial tests I found that if I only took one shot of each composition it was unlikely that I was going to get a usable shot... usually about half of the shots would be ruined due to camera movement which blurs the image. The photos in this set were shot with the cameras set to Manual operation at ISO 400 or 800 - shutter speeds of 1/4 to 1/15 of a second with the lens F-stop set almost wide open. The only way I could ensure success in this tricky shooting environment was to shoot as many shots as I reasonably could of each composition.
As a general rule I prefer to shoot with either short telephoto or wide angle lenses, but for hand held night shooting I chose to shoot with ultra wide angle lenses. The two primary reasons are; the dramatic visual effect you get with ultra wides, and the problems of camera movement that comes from shooting at very slow shutter speeds is minimized when you shoot with wide angle lenses. To avoid auto-focus problems in these dark locations I manually set the lens focus point to infinity, and because wide angle lenses have a very broad depth of field (even at a near wide open F-stop) most objects that are just a few feet away will still be in focus.
In my initial tests I found that if I only took one shot of each composition it was unlikely that I was going to get a usable shot... usually about half of the shots would be ruined due to camera movement which blurs the image. The photos in this set were shot with the cameras set to Manual operation at ISO 400 or 800 - shutter speeds of 1/4 to 1/15 of a second with the lens F-stop set almost wide open. The only way I could ensure success in this tricky shooting environment was to shoot as many shots as I reasonably could of each composition.
© John Mantzefield Photography