New Tricks 7 and 8 — Long Exposure and Messing With ISO
As I go on my photographic journey, I’m noting down things I haven’t done before. These aren’t anything new to any half decent or experienced photographer, they are just new to me as I continue with my journey of discovery with (often wild eyed) wonder into the art of photography after many years of just point and click. This is a double hit, and makes numbers seven and eight in the series, which may run for some time.
There are a lot of settings on my bridge camera (Sony DSC-HX350). And I haven’t been making the best use of them over the last five years of owning the camera. To be fair, I haven’t been making any use of most of them during that period. I do regularly dip into the programme mode, but only ever to change the setting for the colour mode. And as mentioned in New Tricks, the first of these pieces I wrote, I have dipped into the panorama mode now.
But at no point have I used any of the other settings in the triangle. I have always let the camera auto select the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. If I’m honest, until six months ago I hadn’t heard of the triangle, and was completely clueless about the aperture and ISO. That may well explain why there was so much light taken in when taking night photographs, and how that is OK at times, but it did make a mess of the ones taken from the Staten Island ferry at night, with the overcompensating the camera did in auto mode burning out or making the shots blurry. If I knew then what I have been playing with recently, then perhaps I wouldn’t have half a dozen over lit and blurry pictures of the Statue of Liberty at night.
I had heard about shutter speed, and I had seen many, many examples of the use of long exposure shutter speeds to get motion trails on photographs. But I hadn’t realised I could do the same thing with my camera.
When on holiday we had a room which overlooked a road heading up to The Alhambra. We were up on the third floor, and there were louvre doors and a metal rail outside. As I hadn’t taken my tripod, that would function as a solid base to try some long exposure shots. So I set the camera to shutter priority mode, and then went in and manually adjusted the ISO. Its default is Auto, but I changed it to the lowest available — 80, then spun the dial to change the shutter speed, winding it up to fifteen seconds, and I was ready to go.
The road outside wasn’t the busiest in the evening, and so I waited until I could hear a car coming and pressed the button. It is amazing how long fifteen seconds feels in that kind of environment. But it seems a lot longer than fifteen seconds. The shutter closes and the camera processes the image. For a first go it’s not bad. Room for improvement. Busier roads etcetera, but something to return to, and hopefully when I’ve got the tripod with me so there can be a better angle.
I also used the longer exposure and fixed low ISO to take a couple of night vistas, one looking up into the hills to the Alhambra, and then one a couple of nights later on the way down from the Albaicin out over the city.
Both of which came out better than so many night scenes I have taken previously where the camera has auto compensated for the low light with a ridiculously high ISO, and a longer shutter speed, which being handheld often meant a blurry shot.
Whilst I think I’ve got the hang of it in the dark, I am struggling to get it to work to my satisfaction in daylight, there is still work to be done to get any long exposure not white out during the day.
But I feel I am getting there, bit by bit.
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