Practical Cookie: Cape Town At Dusk and Night

Saturday 14 March 2015

Cape Town At Dusk and Night

Just before the fires that ravaged the Southern Peninsula in Cape Town, my mum, Frosty and I had a dinner at the Brass Bell and I used the opportunity to play around with taking photos at dusk and at night (on the drive home).

I experimented with a range of exposures, ISOs and apertures - each picture has more detail on the settings I used. As always, I used my Nikon D3100 while taking these pictures.

Here's a quick reminder of what these 3 different settings mean. Using a combined knowledge of these settings will hopefully help you to improve your photography (it's certainly helped me!):

Exposure (sometimes called Shutter Speed) is how long your shutter is open for. The longer your shutter is open, the more light is let in for a picture.

ISO: This is effectively your sensitivity to light. The higher your ISO, the more sensitive your light sensor will be to light. Also remember that the higher your ISO, the more "grainy" your photograph is likely to be.

Aperture: this is how "open" your lens is to light and it also affects your depth of field. Imagine your eye, where your pupil expands or contracts to let in more or less light. Your aperture is similar to this. A large aperture (f/1.4) means your aperture hole is open wide and things close to you will be in focus while things far away won'te be in focus. A small aperture (f/22) means that your aperture hole is very small and things close and far will be in focus. This post, over at Photography Life, explain it in more detail.

After a bit of editing in GIMP, here is the finished product of these pics - enjoy!