Thursday, February 5, 2009

Taking photos at night without flash

For some reason I have never liked to take pictures with the flash on, not when I had my SLR Minolta and certainly not with the digital camera I now have. A few evenings ago I was playing around with my camera and discovered I could make some adjustments to the ISO settings so I pushed it as high as it would go and took a few photos. I began my experiment with a few photos in my kitchen, of which you see the above photo of my green man wall sculpture. I only had the small neon light on underneath my upper cabinets. I really like the result!

The adjacent dining room is one of my favorite places at home. It has two smaller windows, one facing east the other to the west and a large north facing bay window which I tiled and where I keep some of my plants. I love having my morning coffee here or my afternoon tea and at night I like to light up the lamp in the bay window and sit and read. So what better place than that for my little experiment! I even lit a candle holder I keep on the table in case I want to create a festive atmosphere. I took quite a few photos and this one above was my favorite of the bunch.

Opposite the bay window I have a small antique cabinet where I keep napkins and table cloths. It has a nice oval gold leaf mirror on the wall above it. I took my candle holder and placed it in front of the mirror and started shooting some self portraits. I have never done this, so it took quite a few shots to get some that I could actually use. The one above did not come out too bad, but I think I will try and do this again soon to see if I can't get a perfect shot! The only lighting for these shots was from the candle holder - I had turned off the lamp in the bay window.

This last one is actually a crop from another shot but I sort of liked it even though half of my face is cut off. I did a bit of photoshop to give it more of a painterly effect in the texture. Who knows, maybe I will paint an actual self portrait one of these days!

1 comment:

frankmullerphoto said...

I like all of these! Nice job. I love to shoot at night without flash, especially street photo's on wet nights.