Assessment 1, Activity 8 - City at Dusk

This activity aimed to show the relationship between city lighting and decreasing levels of sunlight at night.

For this experiment I used my tripod, a remote shutter cable and my Tamron 70-300mm lens as my subject was some distance away.

At the beginning of this exercise I photographed from just before the sun set to just after it went dark using various camera settings in Manual mode. I noticed that as the sun went down, I needed to constantly change the settings to maintain enough light to capture a well exposed image. Most particularly, the ISO consistently increased and the shutter speed got slower and slower.

I used my tripod for stability but ran into difficulty as the lens was so large and heavy that camera shake was frequent. However, I needed the long lens as the distance I was at from the building was the only vantage point available to get photos of the building lit up at dusk.

In my images, I have selected some with higher ISO, some with lower, some with longer and shorter shutter speeds and varying apertures. Higher ISO obviously caused a lot of digital noise in the image which was undesirable and the longer shutter speeds left the camera more prone to movement.

I played with various settings but found the images I liked best in these lighting conditions were with a lower ISO, compensating where possible by extending the shutter speed and widening the aperture.