Doha at night

Good shot. I use a shutter cord on all of my 35mm's for night stuff, and my Canon's have preset timers built into them that will wait 10 seconds before firing.

j-dogg said:

Good shot. I use a shutter cord on all of my 35mm's for night stuff, and my Canon's have preset timers built into them that will wait 10 seconds before firing.

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Thanks for the reply. I'm OK with shooting 35mm at night but this is on a Crown Graphic, one of those great big folding boxes with bellows, so it needs a long focal length (this was about 130 or 150) and is more prone to vibration than a solid, chunky 35mm camera, or even normal medium format kit.

The old timers did long exposures with big boxes all the time, which makes me think there is probably a way of getting a razor sharp image on a shot like this. But maybe there isn't, since the lights on buildings are so much brighter than the general scene that even a shake that lasts half a second will blur them in a 30 second exposure, whereas in a landscape even a shake that lasts a second out of 30 would create an unwanted image more than six stops darker than the desired shot and so would be invisible. Also, they were probably less fascist about sharpness than modern photographers since the tendency is to be satisfied with the best achievable result rather than demanding unachievable perfection.

Even so, I don't recall seeing classic city-at-night shots taken by the large format masters, though I may just have missed them.

How about a sandbag on the camera and more on the tripod? A pro I know does this even with his medium format, especially on windy days. When he goes out into the wild he just carries bags and trowel and uses local dirt.

That's an idea, especially for the tripod - not sure I'd want to hang anything too close to the bellows. There is a place for a hook on the bottom of my tripod's centre column.

You might want to try opening the Shutter with a piece of card masking the lens

When you are sure the vibration from firing the shutter is over, then remove the card.

When your exposure time is up, reverse the process - mask then lens and then close the shutter

Astronomers use this technique for their shots of the stars

Just my $0.02

Martin

Thanks, Martin.