Plaza Lights

I think I need to go back late at night. Between people walking into my shots and car traffic, it was a challenging thing to get good photos of the Plaza lights this evening.

A person even asked me, 'Are you recording?' I said yes, and then she walked right in front of the camera anyway. Like she was only asking to make sure she was fucking up my shot.

I was shooting with my ultra-wide Tokina 11-16mm. It'll go to f2.8 as far as wide open shooting goes, but for a landscape situation at night, a lot of times the long exposure at the higher f-stop is the winner.

My D7000 doesn't autofocus, generally, in such low light. Which is frustrating. Seems like at one time I was able to get it to do so more often in these situations but that may be a faulty memory. It's hard to manually focus as crisply as the autofocus when it's working. I use the selective focus where I can target a spot in the viewfinder that I want to be tack sharp and let the depth of field work itself out from there. Looking through the viewfinder or chimping after the shot is pretty limiting, you get home and see it big and up-close on your computer and it's a whole different shot.

It's interesting the things you notice when you do these long shots. Fountains that seem like really good subjects until you notice the shit floating in them or the jets that aren't functioning.