First time shooting at night

[charchri4]

Can't seem to get good shots with good light so I thought I would try it tonight!

Pentax K-3 with a HD PENTAX-DA 16-85mm F3.5-5.6 ED DC WR

1 ƒ/5.0 26.0 mm 15 seconds 400 ISO
Yeah the flag moved...
_IMG0488 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

2 ƒ/5.6 16.0 mm 15 sec 400
Old railroad depot just has to be B&W
_IMG0473 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

3 ƒ/4.5 16.0 mm 30 sec 100 ISO
It was fun messing around with shadows here
_IMG0483 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr


4 ƒ/3.5 16.0 mm 15 sec 400
_IMG0472 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

5 ƒ/20.0 16.0 mm 30 sec 100
I swear this street was level in lightroom!
_IMG0466 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

6 ƒ/4.0 28.0 mm 30sec 100
no way to get a flag to stay still for 30 seconds!
_IMG0457 by Jim Stainer, on Flickr

I really had fun with this and couldn't wait to get back home and see the shots on the big screen. They were not quite as glowing as I thought they would be. Suggestions?

 

[TCampbell]

You may get a gentle reminder from the mods to post in one of the gallery forums (they prefer you not use the "Beginner's Forum" for posting images unless the image is related to a beginner question.)

I do like the rail-road depot shots and you got nice diffraction spikes on your street lights (high f-stop causes points of lights to throw diffraction spikes... one going in each direction for each aperture blade. Since your lens had 7 aperture blades, you get 14 spikes per light.)

As for the levelness of the road, it may be the road (otherwise you'll need to use Lens correction tool or Transform tool because the verticals on the buildings do appear vertical to me and altering rotation to try to level the road would probably result in leaning buildings.)

The flag is over-exposed -- so it looks a bit out of place against the rest of the exposure. Since it's at the bottom of that small hill, we can't see the base of the flag-pole and that gives us an awkward crop on both the flag-pole as well as the gazebo.

 

[charchri4]

Ahh good point. I looked over there and wasn't sure on that. Mods you want to flip or should I delete?

I wondered why some of the shots were more spiky than others and I had a hard time deciding if I liked the spikes. Very interesting perspective I had not thought of on the flag. That view is pretty much looking out my front window so my brain fills in the little park on the shore. When I took the top one I thought about going to get my step ladder but just to get the angle of the flag to the lake better.

It's just astounding how many elements have to be spot on to get a the perfect shot!