Nighttime Photowalk

Recently I meet up with the No Compacts Allowed group to do another photowalk here in Vancouver. This time we met up at the new Vancouver Convention Centre at 9:30PM. The weather was great for a night photowalk, the sky was overcast with a slight breeze, though it did try to rain for a few moments. Don’t forget, you can click on the photos below to view a larger photo without leaving the page!

John kept trying to get the glow sticks to work, but we decided that there was too much ambient light for them to really show up not matter what combination of settings John tried to use.

We spent a good 2 to 3 hours out walking around the perimeter of the new Convention Centre taking photos of the various architechure around the area. I think my favorite portion was when we go around to the west side and had the Coal Harbour buildings in the background. I’ve always liked the lighting of the buildings at night.

After we parted ways at around 12:30AM I headed back home along Coal Harbour’s seawall toward the West End.

For my first nighttime photowalk I really enjoyed myself and had fun taking long exposure photos of the things around us. Just remember, when you want to do nighttime photography you really need to use a tripod or some way of stabilizing your camera. My tripod was some $30 camcorder thing from London Drugs, so you don’t really need to go all out on a Manfrotto thing that can get up to the $500 range. Not saying the Manfrottos and such don’t have their place, in fact after seen them in action I want one, I’m just saying you don’t need to use them.

Another piece of equipment that can come in handy is a remote shutter cable. This helps minimize any contact with the camera which might produce shake and make your photos turn out a bit fuzzy. I also turned off Image Stabilization (IS) as I’ve heard when on a tripod it can reduce image quality.

Other settings I used for our nighttime photowalk were:

• Manual Focus – I found that my camera either hunted around too much or couldnt not figure out what I wanted to focus on
• Manual Mode – I set the shutter speed and aperture of all my shots. Typically my exposures were from 5 seconds to 30 seconds at various f-stops.
• Live View – Since I was using Manual Focus, I thought it would be easier to compose my shot via the LCD Screen on my Canon XSi. Didn’t have to close one eye and look through the camera to see what I wanted to shoot.
• ISO100 – Since I was using a tripod, and longer exposures ISO100 is as low as my camera will go which helps reduce any noise or grain in my photos.

If you are interested in meeting up with the group for a photowalk, don’t be shy and head over to the Facebook group page. It will show the upcoming photowalks that wil be happening in September!

Have you ever gone outside with your camera during the night? What sort of shots did you capture?

You can check out the other shots in my Nighttime Flickr photoset, or check out the No Compacts Allowed group on Flickr too.