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APERTURE
In the still of the night
Photographer Peter Jackson Tells us how he captured this Hong Kong Panorama
Night can be one of the most interesting times to shoot. True, there is no natural light available, but the darkness emphasises colours and it is a pleasurable challenge to work with sparse, directional light sources. There is a naturally strong contrast; the shadows created by often harsh artificial lighting can be interesting to work with.
I tooks this shot from the top of The Peak and it’s a classic scene of the whole city below. To capture it, I used a tripod, wide-angle lens and very slow shutter speed. It was a tough shot to get right; there was quite a wind up there that night and i was strunggling to keep the camera steady. It was also packed with people on the viewing point, so some of my earlier attempts had ghostly human shapes at the edges of the image.
In theory with these shots you should use as high (and therefore small) aperture as possible, but for this one i used a slightly larger setting because of the wind - exposing the shot for more than four seconds runs the risk of blurring.
City panoramas at night can be captured without any special lighting equipment as the city provides its own. Use a small aperture (under f/13 ideally) - the higher the number, the smaller the aperture will be - or just change your camera’s mode to the ‘landscape’ setting. Also, use the widest lens (or zoom setting) possible to fit the whole view into the frame if that is your aim or, alternatively, a wide section of the frame can be cropped out on a computer later on.
To see more of Peter Jackson’s work, visit www.pjjphotography.co.uk
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