Street Shoot

I shot these photos at night on the street outside my house using my digital SLR. Unfortunately I didn’t have access to a tripod, and because I was shooting at night using long shutter speeds, this led to some blurry images.

So that my images didn’t turn out under or over exposed I used a chart that guided me as to what aperture and shutter speed to use under street light conditions.


I chose to use ISO 400 as this would give me smooth gradients of tone while using a shorter shutter speed than would be needed for ISO 800+. By using an aperture of 5.6 I was able to get photos with a reasonable depth of field, and although the chart said to use a shutter speed of roughly 14 seconds, I used only between 1 and 3 seconds. By doing this the photos appear much darker and mysterious, leaving many objects silhouetted.

Even though the blur from the movement of the camera was not deliberate, it does look quite good in some photos. It gives them a distorted perspective, making the night appear more surreal and intriguing. Particularly in the image above, the motion from the camera gives a painterly effect.