Big Brother and Sister Are Watching You !

On Wedsnesdays I usually go into Edinburgh as in the evening I attend the Wednesday lecture session of Edinburgh Photographic Society. So any shopping I have to do in town tends to get done on a Wednesday.

My Wednesday blip also tends to come from my trip from Edinburgh as it gives me a chance to do something of a more urban nature and recently these have largely been night shots. In the past I have always relied on one of my SLRs to do this as I am more familiar with using them for night photography and tend to use a tripod in any case.

However, I decided to try out my new compact, a Sony XR100 for a change to see how it would cope with night photography. I also used a mini-tripod as its impossible to do good night photography without long exposures. As it has rubber feet I found I could happily stand it on the bonnet of my car to get the camera at a reasonable height. I was doing some shopping in a mall and challenged myself to find something interesting there.

So how well did it work out. Surprisingly well. For example the photo I eventually used for my blip did not look half as effective to the naked eye. The large photos of the man and woman on the first floor of the New Look shop were pretty dim but by using in camera HDR which takes three exposures and blends them, they suddenly became a much stronger element in the scene and effectectively transformed a mediocre night scene into something more sinister.