Handheld night photography - possible?

susinead

susinead

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Susanne
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Hi all!
I know I can google this and hit two thousand blog posts, but I'm totally new to night photography and would love to get all sorts of input.
My photography has really declined (not that I was super brilliant to begin with), since I've been so busy with moving abroad/university studies during this year. But on Tuesday I'll celebrate a day off and will (if weather allows) be in Cork city for the afternoon and if it gets dark early enough I'm hoping to take some nice Christmasy street photos, since Cork has some really fabulous Christmas decorations.
What are your ideas about taking night photos without tripod? What do I need to think of and what sort of settings should I use?
I have a decently light camera, an Olympus OMD, with a few lenses, the more relevant ones probably are 14-140mm, 25mm f1.7, 12mm f1.4.
 
Definitley go for the fastest lenses and quite wide. The wide angle maximises your effective depth of field and gives you a reasonable shutter speed. And obviously - look for the light!

Cambridge market a few weeks back. Fuji X-Pro2 and 16mm F/1.4

Cambridge Market by Dave Green, on Flickr
 
So nothing stranger than when I shoot pub gigs then! (dark as a dungeon with crazy lighting)
So will wide open capture the Christmas lights correctly or will they just be overexposed? Should I just go with trial and error? Nothing I can do with metering modes (I'm just learning the difference between them, have always gone with the default before)?

Fabulous photos by the way!
 
susinead said:
So nothing stranger than when I shoot pub gigs then! (dark as a dungeon with crazy lighting)
So will wide open capture the Christmas lights correctly or will they just be overexposed? Should I just go with trial and error? Nothing I can do with metering modes (I'm just learning the difference between them, have always gone with the default before)?

Fabulous photos by the way!
Click to expand...

If you shoot pub gigs, then you will manage it just fine as the lighting in the gigs will be dark moody and all over the place as you will know as that`s what I find doing the gigs.
 
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