Eskimo North

Friday, had to go over to Bellevue to reboot the webserver which locked up. On the way back I went around Lake Washington, and stopped at Kirkland Marina Park to take some night photographs.





While I was there a couple of women asked me to take their picture, so I experimented with a feature on the camera that allows the use of a flash followed by additional exposure to get the night background. Overall I thought it worked out pretty well except I neglected to ask them not to move for a couple of seconds afterwards while it captured the darker background.



After that I went up the hill towards Juanita and went down the street that follows the park along the waterfront northwards and took some pictures of the night sky through the trees from the street above the park.







I like the way things look at night in photographs. The clouds, which are usually plentiful in the Pacific Northwest, are bright against the sky; instead of darkly obscuring the sun. The little pinpoints of light in the distant are vibrant. Between natural lighting and all the different colors of artificial lighting, everything takes on more color.

Night photography is more challenging though, longer exposures are required and the high contrast is difficult to capture well. In particular, it's hard to get enough exposure so that the shadows aren't totally submersed in noise while simultaneously not totally saturating lights and other bright areas. Especially, it's difficult with the camera I am using because it's sensor is noisy under the best of circumstances and it is incapable of exposures longer than fifteen seconds. The autofocus is also worthless at night making manual focusing necessary.