Night Landscapes 2

Another amazing feature of the Nikon P-300 is the Night Landscape mode. This is a fully automatic setting on the main mode dial where the camera takes multiple exposures and then somehow magically combines them all into one good picture. I’m not sure how it works. All I know from using it several times is that it appears to work pretty well and it allows me to take nighttime pictures I could not otherwise get without a tripod and some serious bracketing.

Just for comparison purposes I also took the same shot using my 35mm Promaster body and the 135mm f2.8 Pentax lens while mounted on a tripod (see below). This exposure was made at f4 and ¼ second.

 

As you can see the longer exposure accents the lighting and color and brings out more detail so that in some ways I believe it may actually be a little better than the first shot. Unfortunately this all manual SLR has no image stabilization software so even on a tripod I was unable to keep it steady enough  during the ¼ second exposure to get a clear image on that very cold & windy night.  

Perhaps I will try again on an evening when the weather is not so challenging and see what happens.

For those who care about such things or want to see a daylight comparison this scene is the same RSA Battle House Tower building I shot during the daylight and posted on the blog back on September 27^th of this year titled, “The Tallest Building in Mobile.”

Photographer Diane Arbus once said, “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” This is a great scene in a very obscure corner of Mobile, Alabama that I pass every day going back and forth to work. I really believe that most people, even those in the area, will never see it except in my pictures.