Photos » birds » The lonely swan

Taken on: 2006-10-30 19:02:06
Tags: birds, canon-20d, cork, ireland, irishblogs, lights, long-exposure, night, photos, sigma-10-20, sky, swan, swans, the-lough, urban, water, wideangle
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A solitary swan swims on the calm waters of The Lough as the sun disappears at the end of the day.

Believe it or not, this is a 10 second exposure that turned out much better than I could have hoped! I balanced my camera on the edge of the Lough, set it to Aperture priority mode at f/11, dialed the exposure down two stops, flipped up the camera flash and took the shot.

How does this work?
By setting the aperture to a fairly high value little light is let into the camera sensor.
By setting the exposure down two stops the whole scene will be underexposed but bright areas will be exposed mostly correctly.
Given the above settings, any dark moving objects will be completely invisible so when the flash fired it picked out the swan swimming past and even created a nice reflection in the water.

Hope that helps!

See this photo on Flickr

Comments:
corksurf
Fantastic shot! Don't you just love it when things like that turn out so well.
luciano7
I agree with corksurf, a fantastic shot and what a feeling when the pic turns out better than expected. I like the night time yet with day breaking just over the hills. that swan was still for ten seconds??
Donncha @ InPhotos.org
Thanks for commenting! Luciano7 - I didn't need to worry about the movement of the swan because it was so dark.

Remember, this was a 10 second exposure, very underexposed, so anything that wasn't emitting light itself would have been completely dark.
From experience, I know that if I tried to expose properly the light in the background would have been blown out, and the swan would have been a ghost except where it is lit up by the flash.

By deliberatly underexposing I got a really sharp swan instead!
Ragorder.com
this is sweet. thanks for sharing, and most importantly thanks for sharing the technique. the reflection really tops if off. congrats !
patio_
Hey cousin, I just wanted to let you know that I am enjoying all those wonderful pics that you take.
scribeoflight
An unusual shot. I might crop it a bit differently, but I'm not sure. I really like the fact that I've never seen a shot of a swan at night before.
baedo
That's and incredible shot! Just wonderful.