Friday, just by coincidence, when I was out taking pictures in Xert, the 8gb memory card in my Sony DSLR registered it was full just as the camera was threatening to shut down due to drained battery and I had to carry on shooting with my HX50. I'd bought a new card on special offer a couple of months ago in El Corte Ingles back in Fuengirola, so after re-charge and card formatting, I took the camera with me when I walked to the nearest Mercadona in town for some weekend food shopping, late afternoon.
By the time I'd finished and was walking back, the sun had just set, floodlights on the two bridges across the rio Servol barranco had just come on. It offered me the chance to play around with camera settings to see what I could achieve with a machine that has a good reputation in low light conditions.
I was slightly impressed with this first one I took on enhanced auto setting, but I wanted to try longer exposures with a manual shutter and slower iso setting, as faster iso gives much grainier photos. I prefer to learn by doing, playing around and reading the manual only when mystified by the machine. It proved easier to achieve than I thought, although only one of the batch I took at 1/4 or 1/3 second, handheld was satisfactory.
A fairly steady hand helps. I have a mini tripod but rarely bother to carry it. For the most part I leave a camera set to auto in daylight and make simple adjustments in Picasa's photo editing suite. Still, with time on my hands, and plenty of low light at this time of year, why not experiment a little? Next time I try this, I'll go for photos in darkness with a tripod.
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