First try at night photography

[Grandpaw]

Before I set out to go to town and try and take this picture I loaded up all my lens, tripod and everything I thought would be needed. When I arrived and started to set up the bracket to mount the camera to the tripod wasn't there so I handheld this shot using my Nikon D80 with the 18-200VR lens. Below are the settings.

taken on April 4th 2008 at 7:32 PM
ISO 640
F stop 22
18mm
shutter 2 1/2 seconds.... Remember this was handheld

This is the new bridge that was built between Ocean Springs and Biloxi Ms. that hurricane Katrina wiped out. The building at the left end of the bridge is the Isle of Capri casino.

[Frog]

You have much steadier hands than I do. 2.5 sec...wow I knew vr helped but didn't think it would help that much.

[Bigcity]

That is really good. The colors are pleasant also.

[Greg McCary]

Hand Held it 2.5sec? Wow I guess the lens has IS. The exposure and colors are great. I think you should crop or clone the light pole on the right. Nice work, but you can lower the F/stop some. F/22 is pretty high. Try F/10 and get a faster shutter speed.

[Grandpaw]

Hand Held it 2.5sec? Wow I guess the lens has IS. The exposure and colors are great. I think you should crop or clone the light pole on the right. Nice work, but you can lower the F/stop some. F/22 is pretty high. Try F/10 and get a faster shutter speed.

Thanks for the comment. I did try F-8 and it gave me a shutter speed of 1/3 second. I tried different combinations but posted this one due to the long shutter time. I have a fairly steady hand that seems to do well with the VR lens, Jeff

[SmartWombat]

Yep, Vibration Reduction is what Nikon call Image Stabilisation.

[Frog]

I thought image stabilization is what canon calls vibration reduction.

[Addies Granddaddy]

Any way you cut it, Grandpaw, this is a lovely, lovely shot. I wish I could see a larger version of it though. The current size doesn't do the shot justice.

John

[SmartWombat]

I'm astonished that the VR could operate at 2.5 sec without there being some large movement that it couldn't handle.

With my Minolta A1 (Sony bought them for the IS maybe?) their sensor shift IS was good enough for a 10 second exposure provided I rested one end of the camera on something while holding the other end - I couldn't hand hold it still enough for the IS to cope.