Weekly Assignment: Experimenting with the Motion of City Lights

[PWS-Staff]

Although many people put their cameras away after the sun has set, it’s fun to go out prowling through the night looking for colorful shots of night lights — especially if you live near or are visiting a big city like New York. There are a lot of ways to shoot a city at night, but perhaps one of the most fun techniques is to use a long exposure time and jiggle or swirl the camera around during the exposure. One of the great things about shooting pictures like this is that you don’t have to lug a tripod around because you’re not trying to keep the camera steady. Also, because you aren’t trying to capture short exposures, you can leave the ISO at a relatively low speed, such as ISO 100 or 200.

For this shot of lights in Times Square in Manhattan, I stood on an esplanade in the center of Broadway and took a series of exposures between 1 and 10 seconds each, and just jiggled and wiggled the camera in different directions. After each shot, I looked at the LCD to see the result. This shot was made using an exposure of ISO 1600, f/18, 1/4 sec.