This past week, the theme for Easy Camera Lessons was night photography, so I decided to follow along with their theme again.

Night photography turned out to be a bit of a challenge. I had to actually plan things. I couldn't just pick up my camera anytime of the day, because these photos need to be taken when it is dark outside. This theme did allow me to be a little more creative than usual, and I did learn a couple of tricks along the way.

And for this week, all photos are straight out of the camera with no edits.

This was my first attempt for the week. These solar lights hang right outside our back door, so they were pretty easy to quickly snap at dusk.

Without venturing too far from the house, these canning jar solar lights are in our backyard and made a great subject.

Since there is only so many interesting subjects I can photograph at home while it is dark, I headed out with my DSLR and my tripod to see what I could find around town one night.With all the rain we have received lately, there are quite a few areas with lots of standing water still. I love the reflections in the water and the shades of blue in the sky and water.

For this one I left the shutter open a bit longer to get streaks of light from the cars on the freeway. If I had brought my longer lens along, I could have zoomed in more on this one.

This one is up the hill a bit from the freeway looking east toward the mountains. I love the streak of light heading up toward me as that car's headlights were coming my way.

Have you ever heard of light graffiti? For this one, I just set up my DSLR on a tripod in our backyard, set the shutter speed to 15 seconds, set the self timer to go off in 2 seconds, then I stood in front of the camera with a small flashlight and continually make the shape of a heart with the flashlight facing the camera. This one was fun to do!

My all time favorite night photo has to be this one I shot while on a photography field trip of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Hopefully I have a chance to take more night photos soon.

Have you ever tried night photography?