Night-time Long Exposure (Creative)

After my effort with 30 sec exposures a few days ago, here on blip, with the stars, I went back, but instead of a park bench, used a tripod, proper.

This is where two rivers meet and the pinpoint of light in the distance is a streetlamp. This, along with the rest of the city's, made the whole pic look very orange, so some 'creative' black & white conversion took place and extracting some sort of detail from the inky blackness of the foreground.

A purply security light was on the wall, which incidentally is the perimeter of ex prime minister Edward Heath's house, Arundell's. Had he still been alive - and under constant police protection - I'm sure I would have been 'dissuaded' from shooting there for an hour and a half!

Lens was full-frame 16mm Nikkor fisheye, pointing downward, a bit, creating a nice, but not extreme curvature. I employed the useful gadget that's on both my D700 & D7000's, a 'virtual horizon', found in the Set-Up menu, which displays on the camera screen a circular roundel which shows when the camera body is level; an almost impossible task otherwise, peering through the viewfinder into the dark gloom.

I also used the Mirror lock-up mode, for the first time, which does not lock it up straight away, allowing you to compose etc, but then only opens the shutter a good while after you've pressed it. This means that each shot takes ages, not withstanding the long exposure 'noise-reduction' mode that takes the best composite (somehow) but with both a RAW and jpeg, takes ages to finalise, the camera displaying 'Job nr' for half a minute after. This was reduced by me using my fastest CF card, a 90mbs Sandisk.

Twenty pics of varying success took me two hours and over a battery of power; those gadgets and timed long exposures eating juice like there was no tomorrow. Considering it was 4.30 when I finished, that's exactly how I felt, too!