Cityscape at Night, Fort Worth

With a little online research, I found this awesome location to shoot downtown Fort Worth sitting behind the Trinity River which provided stellar colors of reflection. This was an 18 F-stop for overall focus and to starburst the bright light on the right, with a 30-second shutter to catch optimal light, a 100 ISO for highest clarity, and on a tripod for stability. I shot live view so I could zoom in and manually focus as auto often doesn’t cooperate with dark skies (and I often don’t cooperate with auto). I used different exposures and overlapped them in photoshop to get the best consistent coloring and appropriate brightness between the sky, buildings and reflection. I’m pretty happy with the photo created.

We ventured to another location and shot downtown Fort Worth through a railway bridge. I had previously shot this location with B&W film during the day so I knew it had good potential for a night shot. I really liked the composition, especially the leading lines into the city, but not a fan of the super bright white lights at the base of the building.

The train passed through twice and we were only caught off guard once (we now know how to read the green/red light that was down track). The first time the train passed, I was wrapping up a 30-second exposure so couldn’t get any action, it passed through about the last 4 seconds of my shot, but with a 30-second exposure, you couldn’t even tell. But the light prepped us for the next coming train. I dropped down to an 8-second and got this beauty…

I was absolutely giddy when that photo finished processing.

And lastly, I can’t spend time outside at night and not attempt some experimental abstracts with light. The image below is 3 building light reflection areas on the Trinity River that I shot on a 20-or so-second shutter while moving my tripod’d camera in a specific pattern. It’s called “The Chase” and I was really happy with the final image.

Oh, one more image created with a couple photoshop tweaks…

The End.

(or maybe I should say “To Be Continued…”)