On the evening of 7th October, we thought we’d try something different. A number of club members met up in Aylesbury town centre to try their hand at night shoots. So armed with cameras, tripods, warm clothes, and one or two torches, off we set.
We met up at the Odeon at around 8.15, then huddled en masse to St. Mary’s Church to take night shots of the church, the graveyard, and surrounding streets of the old town. Once we’d had our fill, we moved to the Bourg Walk Bridge by the railway station with it’s undulating, and rather well lit walkway. Finally, we joined Ronnie Barker outside the Aylesbury Waterside Theatre. We decided to call it a night when a large number of coaches arrived for the booting out of theatre patrons.
All in all, I think we all came away with something from the evening, and not just full memory cards, or something that couldn’t be cured with a nice hot cocoa!
Some comments from members
Liz
My camera was on a tripod and settings were ISO 200, shutter speed 3 seconds (I think!?) I waited for a car to pass so I could have extra movement in the shot although the roads really weren’t that busy last night!
Would have been good to get a couple of cars moving in both directions.
Ian
One of the images shows one of my favourite roads in the old town, I went for B&W to give it more of an older look in keeping with the old architecture.
Kathy
The main difficulty I had was in coping with the very bright lights whilst balancing the need for slow shutter speeds. I needed to do processing afterwards to get a better balance. It was jolly good fun and there were quite a few of us on the streets! It didn’t seem as if there was much happening in Aylesbury on a Tuesday evening (apart from the theatre!).
Andy
I used manual mode all evening. I set the camera up on the tripod (a necessity) and set the aperture to around f/18 or f/20. I did this as I wanted to utilise the sharpness of the lens at these middling apertures. I also wanted to capture more depth of field than I could have achieved with f/2.8, for example. I used my camera’s LiveView capability to zoom in and manually focus on all of the shots as I didn’t want to rely on auto focus for some of the darker images. Lastly, using the custom function to lock the mirror up prior to taking the shot coupled with a cable release, I managed to keep the camera steady throughout.