Thursday 7 October 2010

Beyond the Lens - A Night Time View of Gloucester Docks

Written by Tamara Kwan of TammyLynn Photography

This week’s photo was taken at Gloucester Docks at night. 

This image was really a test shot. I’d recently purchased the new Canon 5D mark II and wanted to test and push its limits. I happened to be attending an evening class with The GMG this night and I thought what better place and time to test my new camera’s abilities than at Gloucester Docks. It was quite dark by the time class had finished and I was thankful I’d thought to bring my tripod. After a little walk around the docks I found this lovely view of a tall ship. I set my tripod up, positioned my camera for the best composition. In this case loosely using the rule of thirds and placing the boats in the photograph accordingly. The lens I used was the Canon 24-70mm 2.8.

I took several shots using several different settings, starting off with an ISO of 200 at f9 for 30 seconds. As it was quite dark I had to turn off the auto focus and manually focus as the auto focus doesn’t function well in really low light. At first glance it was a lovely image with lovely light and colour but on closer inspection the ships and the sky were quite blurry as it was windy. So I increased the shutter speed to 3.2 seconds and the put the ISO up to 3200, leaving the aperture at f9. This gave me a much more pleasing sharper image and I was really amazed at the lack of digital noise in the image. The image above has had no post processing done to it, it’s virtually strait out of the camera. The result is a lovely bright image with fine detail and beautiful colour, amazing as it was quite dark out at the time. I’m thoroughly impressed with my results and with my new camera. J

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