Night Shots

I have lots to learn about the art of night photography, but one thing I've caught onto is that dusk is often better than full darkness. When there's too little light for the autofocus to work, manual focus isn't much of a fall-back because if the camera can't see to focus, generally I can't either.



I'm not, so far, a fan of manual focus. I like using manual settings for pretty near everything else, or shooting in aperture priority as a sort of semi-auto so I don't have to guess about light as much, but the D7000's autofocus is pretty rockin' when it can see to do the job. If it can't, it doesn't even try, the shutter button ignores me.



I'm not 100% happy with either of these pictures. I cropped the top of a wrought iron fence out of the bridge shot, it was distracting and not very horizontally aligned. I Photoshopped out a few birds that made little noisy, blurry splotches on the sky, too.

I took these shots cycling home from work the other night on the first really warm, spring-ish day we've had this year as far as I can tell. The caboose is undoctored, but I guess I needed to get closer in if I didn't want that lens flare in the upper right coming from an overhead street lamp. Hard to see these things chimping on the camera's LCD screen, but they're glaring when you open them up on 20 inch iMac. I guess I'm spoiled compared to the days of film when I'd have had to spend money to even get a contact sheet (what used to pass for the preview).