adjusting luminance

I've never been particularly concerned about walking through the Meadows on my own in the dark, despite the occasional horror story emanating from them over the past fifteen years. As the illumination of them at night and my familiarity with them increases it becomes harder to remember the wariness I must have felt when wandering through them in the dark the first few times I wandered through them in the dark. Though occasionally wandered through late at night these days, these days I never really go through them during their peak late-night at union-closing-time rush-hour but it was then when they seemed the most threatening, particularly for people slightly impaired by recent exposure to deafeningly loud noises and boozestuffs due to the presence of people with somewhat impaired senses of decency. The period when I stayed in a flat in Morningside partially coincided with the period when I'd go to Teviot every Wednesday to play pool with the rest of my band and thus resulted in walking back along the paths which were slightly less well-lit back then than they are now when a few other people were doing the same. Despite the relative safety of there being other people within eyeshot and earshot there was still the odd instance of someone demonstrating how easily something could happen, such as when a bloke ignored several smoking-people who walked past him in the opposite direction before stopping in front of (and blocking the path of) a lone, drunk-walking girl who wasn't smoking, whom he asked for a light. Attempting to mitigate the possibility of freaking people out by walking up behind them at night is reasonably easily prevented on night-time streets by crossing the road and proceeding along the other side of the pavement but on a single-track path across some dark grass it's slightly harder; length of step and so on must often be severely adjusted in order to not get too close to people to whom one might be perceived as a potential threat. When standing about at night fiddling about with a camera on a tripod it's always a bit awkward when someone approaches, not so much on a pavement but especially on a narrow path through some trees, at night, when the camera and tripod might well not be visible at the same distance at which a person is visible. Overdoing the crouching/leaning/squatting/focussing stuff might look theatrical but short of taking a few extra shots to generate a few extra tell-tale shutterclicks there's little that can be done to not appear at least slightly suspicious, even when deliberately standing under a light and making sure the face is not too shadowed.

There must be a convenient short word or phrase to describe a shortish (or possibly longish) session taking photographs of a specific subject or small group of subjects or for use for a specific purpose but which isn't 'shoot', which I very much dislike using as it sounds twatty. Whatever it was I went out on/to do yesterday evening which was undertaken with the intention of taking photographs (rather than just walking for exercise's sake), this is a spare from the results.