Night Time Photography- Portsdown Hill

A few weeks back, a friend and I ventured down to Portsdown Hill to capture Portsmouth City at night.

I’d never done a night shoot before so it was definitely good experience even if the photos didn’t come out brilliantly.

To start with, we knew we needed tripods as if you have the shutter set to a slow speed it means that the camera would capture any movement whilst the shutter was open so that was the first thing we needed to set up. As I’d never done a night shoot I played around with some of the settings on my camera seeing what worked and what didn’t.

Even with the tripod set up, some of the images were coming out blurry due to the movement as I lifted my finger off the shutter so in the end I decided to put it on a timer as well. This drastically improved the images.

After correcting that I then wanted to see if using my zoom lens would work well in getting the detail of the spinnaker tower. It did work but the quality wasn’t brilliant as you can see.

I then decided to play around with the white balance settings. It was interesting to see how the different options on my SLT-a65 changed the images so much!

After messing around with the white balance I then put it back to auto and had the shutter set to 10 seconds with a focal length of 17mm. This was my best result.

I know it’s not the best photo but for my first attempt at this type of photography I was pretty happy!

A x