The Gazebo

The gazebo across the street from our house continues to be a photographic inspiration/challenge. I'm not sure how many more ways I can shoot this thing, but it certainly has been good practice for shooting in a variety of conditions.

This time I went for the night shot under a full moon. The gazebo itself is very brightly lit inside, but even with the full moon, the roof is completely dark. I wanted to show the sky in some detail without turning the moon and gazebo into giant blobs of white light. I was using my 50mm prime lens on my Sony A580. I don't technically know anything about night photography, but my thinking was to go with ISO 100 to minimize noise and shoot with a slower shutter speed (since I had a stationary subject). The clouds, though, weren't stationary and I didn't like the look of them with a really long exposure. So I opened up the aperture all the way to f/1.8 which let me fire the shutter at 1/4. It took an hour of editing tweaks (and lots of trial and error), but I'm pretty pleased with the end result.

And here are the other pictures in the "series."