Malaga Night Shot

Another Landscape, during a recent trip over to Spain I made it my mission to get some pictures to print to grace our walls at home.

We knew from previous visits to Malaga that there is a great view point where you can see the city, not too far away from where we were staying with my Brother. The only problem was the hike up to it - quite a steep climb up many steps, BUT as they say 'no pain no gain'.

We made the climb of death up to the view point just as the sun was dropping below the horizon. I got my breath back and set up the tripod and took a good look around. I think there are a lot of times where you can easily be so eager to get shooting that you slap the camera to your face and start firing away without taking a good look around at what there is - it can be so easy to miss great shots that way. Someone once told me "look back and look up" and I really do feel that is a good philosophy to follow. There are many times where I remember this, and turn around to a great shot that I was walking away from and would have missed.

So after a good old look at whats about, I turn to my camera bag, get the body nicely secure on the tripod and think about lens choice which this time for me was an easy choice as I wanted to used my newly purchased Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 Fish Eye, a great lens because of its 180 degree field of view, but perhaps not the first choice for landscape due to the heavy distortion BUT after sticking it on the camera and taking a few shots I was happy with the wide coverage I was getting. I find that IF you want to use this lens in these circumstances the best practice to place the horizon slap-bang in the middle of the frame, that way it keeps the horizon straight (althought it does make some interesting images if you break that rule too).

By now the light is fading fast so to get any kind of colour out of the sky I would have to move fast. I started off by setting the ISO down to its lowest setting to keep the picture free from noise and as I was on a tripod this would not give me any problems. Next, to keep everything sharp I used 'Aperture Priority', set the aperture to f/22 which is the minimum for this lens which gave me a shutter speed of 30 secounds, again not a problem because the camera was steady. White balance was auto as I'd be tweeking that later. As for metering I chose to use 'Matrix', spot was making too many silhouettes of the forground, focus to manual and set to infinity, although at this aperture who cares - everything will be in focus. Not forgetting to use 'Exposure Delay' to lock the mirror up and out of the way as not to shake the camera when I fire the shutter.

I took plenty of shots, playing around with angles and moving up and down distorting the horizon, moved around the view point looking for different angles, used a few different lenses getting detail with the Tele for example. Once I was happy that I'd covered all I could, we made our way back to base and took a closer look at the results. With this particular image I actualy edited in camera. I adjusted the white balance a little and saved it as a jpg file and hey presto.




Remember any questions or comments pleases stick 'em below or email me.