Salford Quays Workshop
Media City is right on the canal network – so where better to teach night photography skills, a location where you get amazing architecture as well as stunning reflections in each shot.
The workshop started at sunset and went on well past the 10PM finish time… when you’re in the zone, may as well keep going!
The Technical Bit
The main skills we showed people were the basics of night shooting – which on my workshops, uses the camera’s histogram extensively. This feature baffles many – it is quite simple in reality, it’s just never been properly explained to them!
What you’re looking for is a histogram where the brightest bit (the right most end of the chart) is just touching the end. If you’re shooting RAW (and you should be!) then a little peaking is ok, this can be recovered.
With many brands, you can do this all in LIVE VIEW using a LIVE HISTOGRAM – on canon, you just press the “info” button over and over again till it appears. On Nikon, it varies a lot from model to model – we were entertained with this again on the night – yet again, it was in a new place in the menu. There were 2 Sony cameras – older ones – and we never did find a live histogram, so reviewed a shot after it was taken.
Exposure times were generally 30 seconds, especially when the water was rippling – long exposures flatten out the reflections.
The Photos
Well here are a small selection of the shots I created
