MICHELLE BLAKEN PHOTOGRAPHY

…So, the Christmas lights at Truro were a challenge due to the extremely low level of brightness in the environmental lighting combined with the movement of the subjects during the event. The event (a Christmas parade), by the way, was an added bonus and just happened to be taking place when we visited, so naturally, I focused on that. In order to achieve any kind of result without flash (flash would be mostly futile in any case due to the distance of the subjects from the camera) I needed to ensure as wide an aperture as possible, around f4.5 and couple this with a fairly fast shutter speed of between 1/400th and 1/640th to combat a) being hand held with a reasonable zoom at around 400mm and b) to ‘freeze’ movement of subjects. I left my ISO on auto, which resulted in a particularly high figure here, around 10,000 ISO, producing a horribly ‘noisey’ image which I later ran through a de-noise program when editing. Not perfect, but all in all, for an image from a bridge camera (Sony RX10 iv), the resulting phtograph is not too bad in the grand scheme of things! …And it depicts a very Cornish Christmas scene!