Friday, December 08, 2006
Lights, Camera - and not much action
Last night the Toronto Meet-up Photography group held a brief lecture on night photography. Then we were to go out to City Hall Square to take pictures of the lights. I missed most of the lecture as I had a quick radio commercial to get out but I did manage to get there for the tail end and was able to stitch things together enough to go out and try my hand.
It was freezing last night - well, below freezing actually - according to one of the fellows there who had a pocket thermometer on him it was -12 C (that's about 10 F). I wore three layers top and bottom, two pairs of socks (one fleece), my Sorel boots that are good to -30 C, a toque with a headwarmer around the ears and two scarves - once inside and one outside. Of course the weak link in this chain was the hands, especially the 'shooting' hand. I brought hand warmers but they weren't much help in this situation. I did wear light gloves inside mittens so my left hand wasn't too bad. But I had to take the mitten off the right hand to take pictures so that hand - well, let's just say, it has finally thawed out this morning!
When we first got to the square, I was quite disappointed. There didn't seem to be any fantastic light display. Then I realized that the main attraction was the marvelous light show being played against the old City Hall building across from the Square.
I was quite pleased with some of the results. I worked in manual mode for all of the shots and pushed my old 2.1 megapixel camera to its limits. Oh how I want to upgrade that camera!
Anyway, here is one of the results:
You can see some more here.
