Exercise: Outdoors at night

The purpose of this exercise is to show a range of different lighting situations at night.  These differ from panoramic cityscapes to narrow streets lit by yellow sodium lamps and brightly lit interiors.  Most of my images have been handheld, particularly those out on the streets.

ISO 1600, f/8, 1/8 sec

 I rather liked this shop window with a spotlight on the decanter.  As with all of these night time shots, I preferred to use Auto WB, shooting in RAW and correcting, if required, afterwards.  This is very much based on the work done in prior exercises where I found that AWB did a very good job.

ISO 3200, f/4.0, 1/30 sec

Above is an example of yellow sodium street lights, giving that very yellow cast.  AWB has resulted in a colour temp of 3600K, and it is pretty reasonable as the sodium light is very yellow.

ISO 200, f/5.6, 30 sec

Something very different, a long exposure of 30 seconds enabled multiple 'firings' to be captured at a firework display on my local airfield.

ISO 200, f/16, 15 sec

Trying a different approach to a photo of a lit fountain and some background lights. Here I moved the camera in the vertical to create this abstract.

ISO 1600, f/22, 2 sec

Here I was experimenting with shooting lights from a moving car.  It has worked to an extent, and given the opportunity, I will pursue this further.

ISO 200, f/11, 20 sec

Here I have a Vampire trainer starting up at night under floodlights.  Gauging the exposure involved some guesswork, as well as when to fire the shutter, since the flames only occur at start-up, so this was a once only opportunity.  I feel that this was quite successful.

ISO 200, f/11, 15 sec

A Douglas Skyraider aircraft running under floodlights.  Here I wanted to capture the yellow painted tips of the propeller creating a disk around the hub.

ISO 1600, f/4, 1/30 sec

Somerset House under white floodlights.  Here I corrected the perspective from the original in Lightroom 5 using its Auto feature for this.  The original is below.  A pretty impressive result, though inevitably some cropping was required.

ISO 3200, f/4, 1/30 sec

A walkway adjacent to Somerset House was painted with this tremendous blue light, was just asking to be photographed.

ISO 3200, f/4.5, 1/20 sec

A more traditional view of London at night.  I have given it a panoramic crop in order to remove the undesired empty space top and bottom.

ISO 3200 f/4.5, 1/20 sec

Finally, lights on London's South Bank, illuminating the Hayward Gallery an surrounding walkways.