The Lights of Christmas

No – not just another bokeh shot of lights on the tree – not that there is anything wrong with that (and it is on my list of things to try this Christmas, especially if I can get myself a nifty fifty with an f/1.8 lens in the sales)… No, this is actually the name of a new lights festival in Sydney.  A small number of buildings were illuminated with spectacular lighting displays, in a similar fashion to the Vivid festival earlier in the year.

So I had another go at trying to capture these impressive shows, at St Mary’s Cathedral again (one of my favourite locations around the Sydney CBD).  The light show starts at dusk, so the ambient lighting is changing quite rapidly to start with, making it much more difficult to judge the exposure required, but once darkness settles, it becomes a bit easier.
Due to the tricky light conditions when we arrived at dusk, I spent most of the time shooting in Manual (M) mode, basing my settings on the camera’s metering, but allowing me to easily over or under expose after chimping the previous shot (for those that haven’t heard the term, ‘Chimping’ is the act of quickly checking the review of a shot on the camera’s monitor between each shot…  It is sometimes used as a bit of a slur against those who do it habitually after every shot, casting them as amateurs - but under conditions like these, the ability of a digital camera to provide immediate feedback means that you'd be a fool NOT to CHeck the IMage Preview).

Here’s the first pair of pictures that show the differing light conditions.  The first (2s at f/3.5)was taken as the light was still fading, and the pattern projected on the building’s facade is visible but drowned out by the ambient light.  The second version (6s at f/3.5) shows the same image after darkness had fallen.  The contrast between the illuminated building and the sky has reversed (the building is now brighter than the sky) and the details of the illuminated pattern can be seen.
The other issue I had (once again), was with moving designs.  Apart from the static 'title' display seen in the shots above, the show itself never stops moving, and with my basic kit lenses, my exposures were generally somewhere between 3 and 10 seconds (there was a girl sitting next to me with an f/1.4 or bigger lens taking great shots - in the dark - handheld!).  My issue, as you can see from the two images below, was capturing a design, rather than just a blur of moving colour, or the 'ferris wheel' type images I got here, as designs moved across the facade or rotated around the Rose window.

In the first of these two images, you may just be able to recognise the yellow blur is supposed to be the sun.  The overall image was fairly static at this point, but the sun itself was rotating slowly.  The image above was a 4 second exposure, but by reducing the shutter time to 1.3 seconds, I got a darker sky, but a reasonably clear (OK, recognisable at least) image of the sun rather than just a yellow blur, as you can see in the ‘winning’ shot of the day, shown below.

I was very pleased to see pretty much exactly the same image on the front page of one of the daily papers the following morning – it made me feel a bit better knowing that their staff photographer was facing the same challenges as me ;-)

Lessons learned...?
1. Get there early to bag a good spot - though we were very lucky, the crowd wasn't that big and I was able to wander around during te ssecond cycle of the show, and get different pictures from exactly square on to the frontage.
2. Choose your angle - though I could get square on, exactly central, the images were actually less pleasing to me and felt a bit 'flat'.  I felt that this angled shot had a bit more 'oomph'.
3.  Don't curse about what you CAN'T do with your camera, but learn how to do what you CAN do, to the best of the camera's and YOUR capacity.  Sure - I'd love that f/1.4 lens the girl next to me had (and it was a Nikon, too), but even with my f3.5, I was able to get reasonable pictures, and I could probably still do better.
Thanks for looking,
and until next time – Happy Snappin’
Grum.