Yesterday I took a walk through the city from about 4am to sunrise, in an attempt to catch the city during the dawn hours. I highly recommend everyone this at some point, as it offers a unique glimpse of the world just before it wakes up. The peace and quiet of empty streets as the sky starts to brighten is a magical experience.
I left just as a thunderstorm was leaving and was greeted by fantastic reflections. The plan was to scout out an area and experiment with night photography, so I can feel comfortable in this environment when I return with my analogue equipment (where every image costs me money). Since I was mainly scouting and time was running out, I left my camera bag and only took the most important equipment: My Minolta light meter with a spot-meter adapter, a Calumet tripod and a Fuji XT-10 with an adaptor and a C/Y Carl Zeiss Distagon 28mm, f/2.8 lens. Factoring in the crop factor that left me with roughly a 42mm full frame equivalent. To make the most of the reflections I slapped a circular polarizer on the end of the lens and left it there.
The overall settings were pretty simple:
*I tried to keep ISO as low as possible
*Whenever necessary I bumped up dynamic range to 200, requiring a minimum of ISO-400
*Aperture and shutter speed were adjusted manually on the fly
*The camera was set to "B&W with red filter" film simulation
*I shot JPG and used the cameras internal contrast settings to boost highlights and shadows
*To prevent camera shake I used a 2 second timer on every shot
Here are some of the images I took with their associated settings, as usual completely unedited:
10s, ISO-200
15s, ISO-400
20s, ISO-400
15s, ISO-400
20s, ISO-400
20s, ISO-400
1/8s, ISO-800
1/10s, ISO-800
As I was shooting with a manual lens there is no EXIF-data for the aperture.
