Photography Adventure - Night Cityscape

It's been a while since we talked about night photography, and my adventures took me into the city last night so let's do it again.

You may have noticed that I like doing digital panoramics. Currently I'm working on a great project that involves a series of city panoramics. Remember, part of making a great photographic work is being in the right place at the right time. In this case I was going for a cityscape of downtown St. Louis while the Old stadium bites the dust. Or should I say when the old wrecking ball attempted to bite the old stadium. Since the news media didn't release the exact date of the wrecking ball swing early enough to get tickets up in the arch, I invested in several tickets to the top of the arch this week, knowing it would happen some time this week. I didn't do to bad. The ball swung into action at 3:08 pm and my ticket to the top was at 5:20 p.m. November 7th. No, I didn't get the actual swing but I did get up there shortly after the first swing had put it's ding in the skin of the stadium.

Since it is dark in St. Louis by 5:20 pm, I knew I was shooting night shots. So I raced to catch the tram, took my table top ultrapod (a small, sturdy tripod that fits on the arch window sills), wide angle lens, and a lens cloth to clean the baby slobber off the window. I tried to talk the arch staff into letting us open a window but they wouldn't do it. :) darn. Those windows do have hinges on them so it must be for a reason.

Rule number 1 of night photography is to use a tripod. When you take a night shot the shutter stays open a loooong time and the slightest move makes a blurry picture. That is why most people can't get decent night shots. They don't bother to use a tripod. I also used my remote control, to avoid moving the camera while depressing the shutter button. Rule number 2, unless you are shooting something close to you, is do NOT use the flash. Most flashes don't reach very far so if you arm the flash, the camera thinks it will have enough light and doesn't keep the shutter open long enough, so you get a dark shot. For buildings, the landscape (mountain icon) setting works well in most cases.

All the rules we discussed about panoramics still aply: keep the lens at the same focal length as you pan, pan at the same level, and frame your panning to eliminate most of the sky (unless you have great clouds you want to capture). The sky is a bit tricky at night. It's hard to tell where the horizon ends and the sky begins. I happened to know from past experience which buildings tops stick out the highest of all the buildings, so I looked for the top of those buildings and framed them to the top of the images. With an 18mm lens, using the 20D, I can get 4 shots to fill up an almost 180 degree view.

When I got back down to ground level I still only had my table top tripod with me. I didn't want to haul the big one through the Arch metal detectors and onto that tiny egg elevator. Fortunately the ultrapod has a velcro strap on it that allows you to strap the tripod to a post. I took several pictures of the old courthouse using this method. The difficulty was that the wind was blowing hard enough to sway the post. So I just kept shooting until I got a shot between gusts. The Old Courthouse is so brightly lit that I noticed the detail of the building was washed out and over exposed when I used evaluative metering (thanks to digital preview I caught that effect and was able to compensate). The night sky caused the smaller area to be exposed more. This is the same issue you have with evaluative metering in the daytime when a bright sky causes a dark foreground, only backwards. So I switched to spot metering, metered on the entrace to the courthouse, and presto, got a great shot.

I also strapped that little tripod to the hand rails on the arch steps and pointed the camera straight up. That gave me some pretty interesting shots. The Arch is lit up at night giving a cool effect. Have fun in your city, where ever it is.

Finally, I met some real nice people on the arch tram. A cool thing about going up in the arch is that they often mix people who aren't together to fill up the 5 seat cars. I like that because it gives me a chance to meet people, sometimes visitors from out of town. So Happy Birthday Danny, it was great meeting you and I hope you liked your visit to St. Louis!

geopic