Night time shooting with the Sony RX100 mkIII

Walking through the local town recently I took some night time shots with my Sony RX100 MkIII. I had got the camera set to a high ISO setting as I was taking hand held shots. When viewing the photos on the computer I was pleasantly pleased with the results from this little compact camera. This seemed to be lacking in the digital noise that I was expecting to see so I decided on a revisit to test out the camera further.

It was raining slightly so there was a sheen on the road surface. I set the exposure compensation to minus 1 so that I could register some deep blacks which should show up any digital noise in the photos. I took all the photos with the Rich Tome Mono setting which takes three images and stitches them together. I started off with this shot with the ISO set to 3200, which looks pretty good.

This is the same image cropped to 1600 x 1200 pixels.

I then pushed up the ISO to 8000 which again, isn’t bad. I would expect to see more noise within the black areas.

This time I started off at and ISO level of 8000.

The image above cropped to 1600 x 1200.

I then increased the ISO to it’s maximum of 12800.

The image above cropped to 1600 x 1200.

The RX100 seems to be an ideal small camera for night time shooting when you want to carry a compact and not want to carry round a tripod.

I’ll be going out again soon to do some more photos using a couple of my micro four thirds cameras as a comparison.

Some night photography in Victorian London.

The collection of streets known as Roupell Street, Theed Street, Whittlesley Street, Cornwall Road and Windmill Walk are all situated in the north east corner of the London Borough of Lambeth. They constitute the Roupell Street Conservation Area and are a collection of Victorian terraces just south of the River Thames.

These streets have survived the march of time and the efforts of developers to be one of London’s time capsules of architecture in a modern city.

They have been used for TV for some episodes of Mr Selfridge and Call the Midwife to name a few.

I wanted to do some photography round this area to capture the character of these streets with the lamps lit at night. It is quite a good area for photography as there doesn’t seem to be too many cars parked around some of the streets, unlike some other areas

It certainly makes a nice change from the ultra modern architecture of The City and Canary Wharf and the Brutalist style of architecture around the Barbican.

Stortford by Night – After Brassai!

I had to go into our local town last night to drop off my wife at a function. Normally I wouldn’t go into town on a Saturday night as it’s absolutely heaving with revellers and all the pubs are jam packed, so no chance of a quiet drink.

I had been meaning for some time to try out my little Sony RX100 camera doing some night time shots as I find it’s Rich Monotone setting very good during the day time.

One of my favourite classic film photographers is the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai. In the 1930s he travelled through Paris at night taking some eerie night time shots of the city. His book ‘Paris by Night’ is one of my favourites.

So I thought I’d try to emulate Brassai in Bishops Stortford.

I set the ISO to 2000 to start with and the aperture at f5.6.

I set the exposure for minus 1 stop as I wanted to capture the dark blacks of Brassai’s film shots.

The Rich Monotone setting on the Sony captures very good tonal ranges but it does ghost people walking at these relatively slow shutter speeds.