PARIS BY NIGHT
If you like good photographs, you are in the right place and fortunately for you I am giving them away for free. They should make beautiful backgrounds for your phone too.I am also going to explain how and where I have taken the pictures. Maybe I might teach you a thing or two although I am not an expert.
Few month back, I had the chance to take part of a night photography course in Paris, France, between Saint Michel and the Louvre along the river Seine. This was really different from what I'm used to as you have to see things from another perspective. In night photography, you have to rethink the way you shoot.
Paris is a beautiful city and apparently one of the most beautiful one. Well, I am sorry to say and it might upset some of you but to me it is just a city where I lived too long. I got use to it, it is boring. However, seeing it at night with the aim to take long exposures forced me to look at the city differently. In fact, lights may become light streams, people in motion become ghosts and rivers become smooth. So I actually do love it.
In night photography, there is two important thing that can ruin your photos: noise and camera shakes. Due to the dark environment, noise is produced by your sensor when you increase the ISO (the sensibility of your sensor to light). The idea here is to keep it as low as possible to reduce the noise, in my case it would be ISO100.
Setting the aperture to f/8 is usually enough. It is opened enough the diaphragm to let light in (without having to wait ages for the photo to be taken) and closed enough to have our photo in focus. Because I want light streams accross the photo I decided to set the aperture to f/22. A cool thing to know about aperture is that the more you close the diaphragm, the more diffraction you will get. So if you have a lamp post in your picture,star flares will appear at the light area. The more you close it the bigger the flares.
Having set the ISO to 100 and the aperture to f/22, and being in "aperture mode", the camera tells us that I need more than 30 seconds exposure. Using the BULK mode, which allows you to control when you open and when you close the shutter, and a remote shutter release cord I managed to do a 90 seconds exposure. It gave me some nice light streams from the boats on the river. To be perfectly still and not produce camera shake which would make your photo completely blur, the camera needs to be on a tripod (or something else but not in your hands).
Thank very much for reading my first proper article and as I said, here is you free picture :) If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate. I will be glad to answer any questions.
Talk to you soon :)