Exercise 33: Outdoors at Night

I went to Satwa specifically to shoot the roundabout seen above.  I didn't expect to get this shot.  I visited all the surrounding commercial buildings hoping to get to a rooftop, but all were locked and the one security guard I could find seemed cooperative but my request was turned down by his superior who insisted I get permission from the building owner.


The last place I went was a government building, a fire station.  Five guys were sitting out front and said, no, the door to the roof was locked.  But - if you like, try the tower.  Out back they a 10-story tower for the firemen to practice working in a stairwell.  It has no door and no lock.  You can use it, if you like, they said, but you are responsible for your own safety.  What a great bit of luck that was.  No sooner than I got to the top and started setting up the tripod than the alarm rang and they all left on a call.  I couldn't find anyone afterwards to whom to say "thanks."

This exercise has us out in the night chasing a few odds and ends, including the above, a street scene with an elevated view to capture auto lights as streaks.  This was a fairly long exposure of 5sec, shot on ISO100 at f7.1.  It was a difficult image to capture well (I produced 21 exposures) because of the large amount of light in the bottom half of the frame.  In Lightroom I  removed all the highlighting for the entire image, then added a filter to the top half in which I maxed out the exposure level.

We are also asked to shoot a brightly lit store front, of which I produced several examples.  Here's one, shot handheld on manual, ISO800, 1/60, f4.  I was ready to shoot when the car drove up and parked,  I went ahead and shot anyway - and waited.  After 10 minutes I left.  It was a long night already.

We are also to shoot a building lit with lights outside the frame. I haven't yet found one of these.  But while waiting for darkness, I did shoot some bicycles using a panning technique.  All shot under low light at dusk.  

Finally, we are to look for an interior with a large amount of people, like a mall, and to shoot handheld. These I have plenty of from previous work at the Dubai Mall.  I was there just the other day and happened on this corner where tourists frequently take photographs.  Once I get an inconspicuous point-and-click I want to spend a day taking pictures of people taking pictures.  This particular image was not a huge lighting challenge as this area is near doors and so gets a decent amount of sunlight.  

Here are two more from the mall with slightly more challenging lighting conditions.  These shops are located far from daylight and present intense light directed out of a frame.  The camera tends to underexpose, so adjustments have to be made before shooting, in post processing, or both.  In the images below I had to increase exposure and in post processing bleed out much of the highlights, as much of both images consists of white space.

I found a cool camera that supposedly does very well under low light. I might need to get a part-time job to afford one.

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