San Francisco – Pt.1 : Night Shooting

 Deserves a quiet night…

There are few things more spectacular than the golden gate bridge at night and I was extremely keen to use the excuse of being out in SF to have a first stab at night photography.  In hindsight, it might have been sensible to have a go somewhere a little more boring first, get used to the concept. Nah, jump right in the deep end and see what happens. I do that a lot.

First weekend

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So, what did I learn this weekend? Quite a lot actually, I am still processing a lot of it, but I did shoot my first pics that stink, with the camera in Manual mode; that was rather pleasing. Kind of like the first time you take the stabilisers off your bike and your dad shoves you down the road towards the canal.

Key learning's from the weekend coming up then:

Weapon of choice

In my last post I talked about my approach to this hobby and shared the list created from the advice given by my pals on Facebook. Today I am going to focus on step 1, "buy a camera".

Four days have passed since that conversation and I can honestly say that this has been confusing as hell. It doesn't seem to matter how many reviews or guides I read, it all seems to come down to one thing. This one is rubbish, get a more expensive one; then once you have it, take off the lens, throw that away and buy several new ones. Oh, and they are also rubbish, unless you get the bloody expensive ones.

This led me to my first real decision. I need to draw a line in the sand and steadfastly refuse to spend more than the amount I have promised myself. I have decided that my absolute limit for the price of a new camera is 600 quid. I am after all a complete beginner and suspect that anything better than that would be somewhat wasted on me, for now at least.