Carnival at Blue Hour

Last night we took grandchildren to the Sharptown Fireman's Carnival. They are old enough to roam alone and I took the opportunity to do some blue hour shots. If you're not familiar with the term "blue hour" it is loosely defined as the hour before sunrise or the hour after sunset. A major advantage of blue hour photography is that you can get night shots without a plain black, nothing sky.

It's not difficult to take shots like the one at right. I wanted the look of night and I wanted the rotation of the lights and the blurred Ferris wheel to be visible. It was 7:30 in the evening and not quite as dark as the photo looks. Had I shot in "P" or Program mode my shutter speed would have been too fast to show the amount of blur that I wanted. I chose, instead, "A" or Aperture Preferred mode. In this mode I choose the aperture and the camera's computer figures out the shutter speed.

Since in this mode I was still allowing the camera to calculate the "correct" exposure, I stepped in. The camera would think "it's dark, I'll lighten it up". The photographer (me) was thinking "it's a little too bright and I want a night look so I'll darken it". I held down my little Exposure Compensation button (see earlier post) and dialed in 2 stops of under exposure. (That turned out to be a little much and I brightened it, just a little, in Lightroom). This gave me the night look I wanted, but I still had to set the aperture. I wanted a slow shutter speed so I had already decided to set the ISO to 100; and to make sure the shutter speed was slow I chose a small aperture f/22. By lining up my shot I could see in the viewfinder that my shutter speed would be 1.3 sec and the shot here is what I got.

Let's be honest here. I took this shot four times; f/8, f/11, f/16, and f/22. Since the camera's computer was calculating the exposure, the four shots were identical in brightness because the camera kept changing the shutter speed as I stopped down (made smaller) the aperture. I kept going to smaller apertures to force the camera to use slower shutter speeds, to increase the amount of blur. At f/22 I got what I wanted and stopped.

One final point. With a 1.3 second exposure ya gotta have a tripod and I didn't. This was "night with grandchildren" not "photo expedition". Sooooo there was a nice white, plastic picket fence near by and could hold the camera against a fence post (keeps the camera still) with my holding hand sitting on the fence rail (keeps my hand still) and get a sharp shot.

Some might disagree, but I think night shots are very forgiving so, try them. Generally you will need a tripod but as you see sometimes and handy stump will suffice.