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?

Now I know I usually post something about Compassion on Mondays here on my blog, but I just have to share with you what I was able to do on Saturday this past weekend. Since last fall, I have been taking a photography class through a local photographer. He teaches through one of the charter schools, but he is open to having adults join in his classes, which I have really appreciated! My camera now sits in manual mode almost 99% of the time while I am shooting pictures, and I love having the control over the settings.

So on Saturday, our class went on a field trip to San Francisco for a whole day excursion. The city was quite foggy which was a little disappointing because I was really looking forward to going to a spot I had never been before. The plan was to end our day at the Marin Headlands around sunset time to get night time shots of the Golden Gate Bridge. But it was not going to happen, there was just too much fog to make that trip over the bridge. So we started heading back home…or so we thought.

There is an island part way across the bay as you are driving back over the Bay Bridge. We decided to give it a try. So, with all of our camera gear and whatever warm clothing we had with us, we made our way across a hill to set up our tri-pods for some shots of the San Francisco skyline.

ISO 100, 135mm, f/22, 30 seconds

At first, it really wasn’t quite dark enough

ISO 100, 100mm, f/25, 30 seconds

Amazing what a difference a few minutes later can make

ISO 100, 70mm, f/8.0, 13 seconds

Then someone suggested that I open up my aperture and change my white balance settings in my camera. Can you see the light trails in the bottom right corner from a boat?

ISO 100, 70mm, f/8.0, 13 seconds

The only difference between the last picture and this one is the white balance settings. Which one do you like better?

ISO 100, 120mm, f/7.1, 10 seconds

We did move around a bit on the hillside to get just a little different perspective

ISO 100, 120mm, f/7.1, 10 seconds

Again, the only difference in these last two photos is the white balance setting in the camera. Which one do you like better?

We were all out on the side of the hill for just over an hour shooting pictures. I had a great time adjusting settings, moving around to different spots, and learning how many white balance settings I have in my camera. There is always something new to learn, right? Now I have to tell you that these photos are straight out of my camera, I have not done any editing on them yet in Lightroom. I know they need a little work, so hopefully, I will have a bit of time this week to play around with these…or any one of the almost 300 pictures I took on Saturday.

Did you take pictures of anything fun this past weekend?

Welcome and thank you for stopping by!

Love my family, flip flops, baking, reading, photography, traveling, and Compassion International