Shivering On The Dock Of The Bay

My strange obsession with nighttime river and barge pictures continued unabated on my most recent stay in Northlandia. The reason for this is, most likely, my inability to get what I am looking for in a picture: the freezing of a moving object in low light. Not to get too technical, there is a sweet spot somewhere between ISO, aperture and shutter speed that will allow me to capture a barge at night. Sounds simple, right? It's not.

Whip up the ISO to allow more light saturation and you end up with a grainy picture.

Turn down the ISO and aperture in order to make the picture less grainy and you end up with too little light.

In order to get enough light into the camera to illuminate your surroundings you have to have a timed exposure. Okay, when you set it for a 1 second exposure, the lights of the barge will move within the frame for once second. You haven't frozen the barge. If you make it 1/100 second in order to freeze the barge, then you haven't allowed enough light in. See? It is a technical question that even with voracious reading on the net hasn't solved for me. So I continue trying different settings in order to find that perfect conjunction of those three settings.

This night featured an almost full moon and partly cloudy conditions.

This was a 2.5 second exposure with an ISO set for 1250. I was just trying to get the controls somewhere that would capture the night with a reasonable view of the sky and the clouds. It is not a perfect picture, of course, few are. When you set up at any location you always take a few to get your settings. Tonight was chilly so I kept my truck on to warm up and then jump out and take some more.

In a rare post on Facebook, I slapped this up and received some nice comments. For those who haven't seen it, this is from the boat ramp in new Boston looking almost due west. This is where the river curves west and to the right straightens out again toward the south. I like this picture because it not only has a little splash of red (I like a little red in pictures or paintings), but it also captures a little faint light of a barge about to turn toward me.

I have some more pictures that will be posted soon from this vantage point and others from night shots. Thanks for clicking on this site again.

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