Royal Albert Dock at Night, Two

Today was my second attempt at talking some photos at night, also at the Royal Albert Dock. I started taking them at 5:30, by then the sky was dark resulting in a black sky.

Some of the resulting photos are shown on this page.

The first one was taken from almost the same location as yesterday’s but is zoomed in a little bit more. Because the sky is black, it’s hard to make out the edges of some of the buildings, unlike yesterdays. Which one is nest? I don’t know, I like both of them. It would be interesting to see what today’s photo would be like under a full moon. Lots to learn!

Today I was on my own, though my friend John was waiting patiently in the Baltic Fleet, for me to finish.

Below is a wide angle shot taken from the same location.

Below is a photo of the Liverpool Wheel in motion. The exposure time was 3.2 seconds, so the wheel moved a little, as can be seen in the photo.

The next three photos show two of the Royal Albert Dock warehouses, across the Salthouse Dock.

The Liverpool Wheel again.

A Long distance shot of The Strand across Canning Dock. The exposure time was eight seconds, in that time cars move a short distance. As can be seen by the white and red streaks on the road.

The remaining photos were taken inside the Royal Albert Dock.

The first shows some of the massive columns holding up the warehouses.

The next one might be a little better if there was some light in sky (like in some of yesterday’s photos), there is no detail for the warehouse walls, though you can see some of the windows.

The next two were taken from the same location and show the power of the zoom lens on my camera. The first was taken at the maximum zoom (480mm) and the second at the minimum zoom (24mm). The building in the first photo is the harbour master’s building.

Observations and Issues

This morning, I reviewed yesterday’s photos and was very happy with them. I published five in yesterday’ journal post. Today, I went back to take some more, after sorting out some of the issues that cropped up yesterday. The weather held, no rain or wind. The weather forecast (Met Office) was correct for once.

Camera Shake and Remote Release

After yesterday’s problems connecting the camera app to the camera, I did a bit of research before going out today.

I found out that it’s possible to store the camera’s Wi-Fi details in the phone (rather like you store your home Wi-Fi in a phone or laptop). It’s then very easy to setup the link, it takes ten or so seconds. The connection was still lost occasionally; a number of times the app froze, telling me it was waiting for the camera to perform some processing. When this happened, the link needed to be reset, an easy and quick process.

Levelling the Tripod

Before I went out today, I also had a go at moving and levelling the tripod. It has two levelling bubbles to help level it, though one of them is difficult to see at night, I need to carry a torch! Hopefully this will be become easier as I use the tripod more and more. The photos on this page also had a lot of perspective corrections.

Self-Conscious

Today there were a lot of people around as it was early evening on a Saturday, again, they just ignored me. Apart from a group of four young women who wanted me to take a photo of them. It was a cheap camera, but what’s interesting is the camera used film. I hope my photo turned out OK.

Exposure Times

I let the camera sort these out, it’s much better at it than me. Most of the time it gets it right.

I also let the camera sort out the focus.

On both days I used an aperture of f9 (shooting in aperture priority mode) to get a decent depth of field.

Yesterday’s photos were taken with an ISO of 400, resulting in exposure times of two/three seconds. Today I used 125 to get better quality, this (and the fact that it was darker) increased the exposure times to around ten seconds.