After the great night pictures I took at the end of my previous roll of
film, I decided to try a whole roll at night. The last time I used
100 speed film, which is very sharp, but quite slow. This time I went
for 1000 speed, figuring it should make it easier to get plenty of
light in shorter periods of time. 1000 speed is much a much coarser
grain film, however, so the pictures wound up being a little fuzzy.
I think in the future I'll just go with Kodak's premium 200 speed for
pretty much all applications.
This one turned out a little dark as I was only able to set up to a 16
second exposure with the self-timer. There was a full moon on this
night though, so with the high-speed film and fairly good light from
the moon, this one turned out ok. That's my Civic behind me too, but
you can't really tell.
Ok, this one to the left is one of my better attempts. And no, I did
not paint that or touch it up in any way. What happened is I started
this 75 second exposure with no cars around. Shortly after I hit the
button, I heard a truck coming from behind. Knowing it's headlights
would completely wash out the scene, I waited until it started to get
close, then turned the aperture to the least light-sensitive position.
The headlights illuminated the scene a bit, but didn't wash it out, and
the tail lights just left their streaks as it passed by. Once it was
a fair ways down the road, I turned the f-stop around to take in
maximum light. Since the truck was still down the road there, once I
did that it's headlights completely washed out everything down the
road. Very cool indeed.
This one was a 90 second exposure, which with 1000 speed film under a
full moon, sucked in so much light that you'd hardly even know it was
a night exposure, if not for the stars. I actually did a less than
zero gamma correction on this one to try to get it to deepen the color
of the sky a bit. Crazy. Should have just used 200 speed.
Page Created 1-17-97