The other night I went out to Colonial Williamsburg to play around with some night photography. I got out there at about 9:30 and it was DARK! It was so dark that I had to use the manual focus because the autofocus couldn’t get enough light to work.
While the results weren’t as go as I had hoped, there are lots of BIG trees that obscure things, the sequence below should be pretty indicative of the keepers.
I decided to shoot down the green at the Governor’s Palace. The green has a few small lamps and the palace isn’t lit (this is Colonial Williamsburg after all), I was hoping that there would be some torches along the green but not this night. It was dark, and I had to manually focus on a light in the tower of the palace. This give you and idea of what I was dealing with, although it’s light compared to what I was looking at:
In all honesty, that’s much lighter than what I had because I could barely make out the outline of the building. However with the shutter open for 10 seconds I got this:
I like this shot a lot. Considering how dark it was, I thought that the Palace really came out well. Although I just had to go a little farther - enter Photoshop. A quick tweaking of the levels resulted in this:
This just blew me away. Despite the low light, not only did the Palace show up extremely well - but so did the green in front of it! This actually makes it look like the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg is well lit at night - one might say in a very un-colonial fashion…
