The Walkabout: Shadows in the Night

First attempt at night photography. Lesson learned?....light is my friend!

You might notice I didn't really cover a lot of ground. The reason being is that so much time was spent at each place trying to learn better techniques for zeroing in on the right exposure with what little light was available. I did NOT want to use the flash because I wanted to practice capturing moments in their natural lighting by only adjusting aperature, shutter speed, and ISO (plus flash is a whole beast I'm not ready to face just yet). Frustrating at times but honed some skillz and discovered where more attention needs to be devoted. Perhaps the "run, shoot, ask questions later" mentality should be temporarily shelved, and more consideration should be placed into taking a class or reading up on photography tips/tricks. However, I think there is something to be said about actually stepping outside, making mistakes (or ALL the mistakes in my case), and learning from them.

Alright for a moment of personal hat tipping...I thought most of the pictures I captured last night were total garbage at first. That was until I got to the post-processing phase. At first, every picture had a rusty hue to it because the D.C. night sky was soooo orange (light pollution?). The remedy? Reducing the saturation of the orange hues! Duh, of course. Now you'll see that the sky looks like a night sky (albeit cloudy) instead of a rusty blanket.

Another editing eureka moment was when I lightened the photographs' shadow saturation. Unexpectedly, the exposures for most of the pictures were spot on. But by being able to draw back the shadows a bit, the picture really started to pop (most notably, I think, with the WWII Memorial photos). Is there a way to compensate for this while taking the photo? Help?

Blah blah blah....ok moral of the story? And this seems to be a reoccurring theme...but I have A LOT to learn.

A shameless plea...if anyone knows any professional or experienced hobbiest photographers that want to spread their knowledge through overly receptive ears...please let me know.

Below are only a few of the actual exposures I took last night. The ones that did not make the cut are basically the same photograph compositions but they were the practice shots that eventually got me to the photos you see on here.