The other thing it does, at least for me, is to help give me a gentle nudge to keep my eyes open, and gear at hand, ready to take some photos for the next week's thread.
As a case in point, after reading your commentary in the opening post this week, I decided I needed to change things up a bit, and to accept your challenge to at least try and do something different from what I normally do.
I haven't done much in the way of night shooting, but the Monterey wharf is only a few blocks from my apartment, and there is always something there to photograph, so off I went, and even though I took my tripod with me, these are all hand held.
My thought on taking these, as an experiment, was to expose for the lights, to keep them from blowing out, and then adjust the rest in post processing, which consisted of boosting shadows 100%, pulling the exposure up to taste, adjust the black level, then finally bringing the highlights back down to give a nice warm glow.
All this ended up giving me a fair amount of noise, so I used fairly aggressive noise reduction. Some folks don't like how that looks, but for me, it tends to give a painterly look to the image, and I like that.
I was reasonably happy with the results. Hey, getting 3 shots from a walk is pretty good for me, but I'd be very interested in any comments or suggestions concerning post processing or thoughts on my exposure technique.
Nice timing for a photo, by the way.
).
