Today in the evening I felt like I needed to take a walk. It was raining a lot in the last weeks but today only for a few hours. So, I thought it might be a chance to get some fresh air. I thought I take some evening photos in the city. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to photograph and I started walking with the mindset “If you don’t find something, you did at least take a walk”. I don’t think that I am good at night photography but you know, I like to experiment and photography is for me, an activity but not a profession.
So, I like to experiment a lot. When I walk through life, I sometimes notice scenes that I personally like. And photography allows us to capture what we’ve seen. When I walked past a restaurant in the city today, I noticed the illumination and liked the ambiance. So, I thought I take a photo. It was shot at 34mm at f/4.2 and 1/50 seconds handheld with the camera manually set to ISO 6400. I used a bit of noise reduction during editing due to the high ISO setting…
Diary of Dennis 
Handheld night shots are difficult. Your photo look very good.
Yes, definitely more difficult. I’m still practicing this. It’s a lot more restricting than the usual shots during the day. But definitely fun too.
I recently went to St. Augustine. I like to photograph the boats at around sunrise but it was dark and cloudy and I forgot to bring my tripod so I had to use a high ISO. The photos came out okay but most were too grainy to post.
Noise reduction works for me in that case but with the downside of making the photo a bit more blurry, of course, depending on how much noise needs to be removed.
I sometimes take my tripod with me but it makes me feel less spontaneous. That’s my big problem with tripods.
I carry a small tripod with the bendable legs. I’m not sure what it is called but you can wrap the legs around something like a fence post or whatever. It’s not as good as a regular tripod but it is easy to carry and it does work.
That’s a good idea. I’ve seen these things. I think they’re called GorillaPod’s if they’re from the brand Joby. But I assume other brands build them maybe too.
Yes, that’s right. They do work fairly well.
I always thought they’re for smaller cameras with less weight but it seems there are also DSLR version of them. I might look into this in the future because I do like to stay flexible when doing photography and a big tripod definitely kills the fun and flexibility.
I feel the same way.
Very nice capture! Your post edits look natural. You would never know you used such a high ISO.
Thanks, Sheila 🙂 I am glad you like this. Noise reduction in Lightroom works pretty well.