Taking Photographs at Night!

Sometimes it is interesting to take pictures in the garden at night. One of the exercises in my digital camera master class book was to go out and photograph night scenes. Well living in the country I didn’t have bright, busy roads with lots of coloured lights to photograph but I thought it would be fun to experiment with what I did have to hand, namely flowers!

These pictures of nasturtiums show the difference between no flash and flash. The first picture was shot in macro mode but the second picture wasn’t. Apart from the use of flash that was the only difference. I used a slow shutter speed on both of them.

With the honeysuckle, photographing it without using flash but just making the aperture smaller (F2.8) gave a very ethereal quality to the picture. With the flash on there is a brighter picture but less intense.   

 

Then I pointed the camera up into the oak tree and did the same exercise again. The difference is quite startling. Whereas in the first picture there are interesting shapes and cut outs where the sky can be seen, in the second picture it is very obvious what the subject matter is.

 

At night the Japanese Anenomes have a surreal quality about them that they don’t have by day. I can see why they are sometimes referred to as Moonflowers.

 

 And finally these last two pictures were shot at night some years ago. I was desperate to get a picture of the small silk ribbon embroidered bag I’d made to put on a brochure for classes I was doing. It was night but I thought with flash I’d be fine and I was. But I got a bonus! Unbeknownst to me we had a visitor in the garden and I got this picture of a badger! This was before the hawthorne tree came down and we didn’t have houses behind us. Now we are so built around that no badger could ever find his way here! This picture was taken with the zoom and an ordinary flash.