Jetty On The Lake

The BBC had forecast a cold but clear night. With this in mind we left home just after  1am this morning and  headed over  to  Petersfield Lake.  In reality it was bitterly cold, but there were banks of cloud drifting lazily across the sky, some were really thick, which blanked out all of the stars, some not so.  This image is one of the best I managed  to capture over a 90minute period.  I feel i’m now getting to know my camera controls quite well, well at least where they actually are, if not knowing what they actually do. The main lessons of the night were, how to focus the lens in low light conditions, and how to balance exposure time and ISO levels to keep noise to the very minimum.   After spending most of my time with this camera in Auto mode, I feel quite pleased that I’m now shooting in manual mode, WOHOO...!!

The settings I used for this particular image are ;-

White Balance, Tungsten

ISO, 1600

Aperture, F3.5 ( Lens used, Canon 10 – 22mm F3.5 / F5.6)

Focal Length, 10mm

Exposure, 20s

Exposure delay, 10s.

The jetty and tree  in the foreground were light painted during the exposure just to make them pop.

The Petersfield area is light polluted, but nowhere near as bad as the local cities  of Portsmouth and Southampton, bearing that in mind,  I’m really pleased with this image, and can’t wait for our next night time adventure.

Best viewed large.