It gets difficult in these later months to shoot. By the time I leave my office, the sun has set and opportunities for rapid fire photography become slim. There are tricks to getting still shots at night without a tripod, and I usually go in this order:
1. set my shutter to 1/60 or maybe 1/50. I can’t hold a steady shot much lower than that and the action will get blurry. Hold the camera very still.
2. increase the width of my lens to gather more light by manually setting the f-stop as low as possible. This is helpful with lenses that have a wide aperture, preferably to f/1.4, but at least f/2.8. This will decrease the depth of field, but will gather more light faster.
3. the last ditch effort is to begin increasing the ISO. This has the harmful effect of increasing the noise in the picture. Go past 800 or 1600 and you can get away with it unless there are any sharp points of bright light in the frame. This is based on sensor design…you are bringing the noise floor up considerably to capture light faster, at the same time reducing the headroom.
If all else fails, throw all these techniques out the window and make a bunch of streaks!
umm… exhale before pressing the shutter like a sniper?
I just close my eyes, click and pray.
There are other ways to do that. http://www.masswepray.com/
GAAAAAHHHH!!!!!
*squint*
*click*
*hope to fucking Christ that that website is gone when I open my eyes*
Just blur it up.
You might have heard of this. Is there something similar in SF? Do photographers gather to NYC for the unique light on these occasions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge
That is straight up awesome! Certainly light only cascades down California on certain times of the year, usually July august etc. Thanks a lot for this link, I am certainly setting something like this up in SF!