Club Meeting January 26th

Night view in Wadswick Green

Our next meeting is on Thur 26 Jan at 10 o'clock in the Village Hall.  Please let me know whether or not you are able to attend.

The main agenda topic will be to discuss the future of the club.

• Do we want to continue to meet?
• If so:
  • How often?
  • For How Long?
  • To do what?
• What are the aims of the club?
  • To encourage and improve our photography.
• How can we resolve problems sharing photographs.

We will also give everyone the opportunity to show their favourite photographs from last year for (gentle) constructive criticism.

Please can I encourage you all in the meantime to make an effort to share at least one photo with me via Google Photos (using the following instructions) or by using Apple Photos.

Night Photography

I wanted to include a bit of foreground interest in this shot, it would have been better with more light in he tree.

The images on this page were taken from the grassed area south of the Greenhouse.  I had noticed that the lights shining up into the trees have been cleaned and thought the uplit trees would make some good images.

I had surveyed the area during daylight and selected a suitable viewpoint close to the visitor's carpark but found that the lights from the rear of the Greenhouse are very bright and cast my shadow over the trees I was trying to photograph.  I had to move further down towards the swings.  The light levels in the trees were not, however, as bright as I had expected them to be.

I used my Canon EOS 90D.  I wanted to isolate the trees from their surroundings in order to avoid getting any background buildings in the image so selected my 18 to 135 mm telephoto lens expecting to use it at the longest lens setting.  As it turned out, an even longer lens would have been useful to allow more space around the chosen image as it was difficult to frame the shot in the dark.

I wanted a shallow depth of field so set an aperture of f8 accepting that meant a long exposure and high ISO setting.  I fixed the ISO at 3200 to avoid high levels of noise.  I realised this would give exposures of the order of 1 second so a tripod was essential.  I used a 2 second delay to avoid any camera shake from pressing the shutter release in the dark.

Closer to the image I was looking for, I have converted this version to black and white in order to boost the exposure without introducing colour noise.

Summary

• High ISO
• Small aperture (f8)
• Long exposure 0.8 sec
• Tripod essential
• 135 mm lens