Photoblogging

(As always, click the pic for the full size image.)

I don’t have much experience with long nighttime exposures, and what experience I do have is twenty years old. This shot proves my inexperience. The city lights are a little too bright, and the mountain is too ghost-y. Those are problems I probably couldn’t correct, even if I knew how. What bothers the hell out of me are those reflections (or lens flares, whatever) near the center of the picture.

Are they simply the result of too long an exposure? Was the camera somehow picking up lights from my house over my shoulder? Was I using the wrong filter?

If you’re good at these kinds of pictures, let me know what I did wrong. I took it at f/4.5 (that the max aperture at the given focal length) at 70mm for 158 seconds, using a standard daylight filter.

Tonight’s shot was just for practice, before I get into cityscapes later this year in Mexico and London. Be a shame to waste good photo ops in those places if I still don’t know what I’m doing.