Handheld hunting in the darkness

, (My dearest Obu is advised not to read this one. ;-))

Photography. Greek for the words "light" and "write". Thus, it comes as a little surprise, that it gets rather tough at night, since there generally is so little light to "write". This becomes especially difficult if you do not have a tripod, and have to shoot those atrociously long shutter times hand-held. Still being at the honeymoon stage, I took my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 for a walk. It did not particularly surprise me, that the cannon made it possible to shoot decent pictures at night as well.
At 17 mm focal length, it is possible to take a photo at shutter speed of 1/8 sec, and have it come out nice and sharp. Also note, that although this picture is shot at a rather high sensitivity of ISO 800, the noise is very well managed, barely noticeable. When it gets darker, picture with the same settings will have worse noise, especially on the sky. (Note the following photo.) This can be somewhat improved by post-processing.
The Bean. Famous and often visited, it was a real pain to get this shot off without people standing all around the place. :-) Sometimes the picture itself doesn't look blurred, but merely soft. Alas, there is no recipe for sharp pictures with long shutter times, other than tedious trial-and-error, or a tripod. This shot would have been much nicer if it was sharper:
Also, shutter speed often affects how the picture looks in the end. This is especially true if there is something moving in the scene, which is often the case with water. To achieve a pleasant, flowing effect, you have to keep the shutter open for quite some time. The problem occurs when there is a stage such as this, and there is nothing to support your camera against. It took me around fifteen tries to get this photo, and it still isn't quite sharp. Oh well, not even holding your breath can help to keep perfectly still for two seconds.
On the other hand, sometimes you might want to snap the shutter real fast to freeze action. If you do so at night with ordinary settings, all you get is a black picture. The only way to go around this is to open your aperture wide, and boost the sensitivity as much as possible. The trade-off will be unpleasant noise, but sometimes that's better than nothing. I was surprised that it was possible at all to shoot at night at 1/100 sec. The noise in the sky is manageable.
The exposure can be set to abnormal lengths to achieve impressions otherwise impossible. I'm sure everyone has seen those nice urban pictures of car trails. Well, basically all it takes is a good spot and a something convenient to stabilise your camera. I didn't have neither, so mine are kind of lame. However, I will be definitely be exploring this kind of photography further. :)

Who needs a star filter, anyway? :-)

I am quite satisfied with overall low-light performance, although I can't wait to get a tripod, anyway. This is the kind of photography, where the approximately ten times larger sensor of an APS-C DSLR over a compact really shines. Thanks for viewing, and I'll let you off with a few more shots.

The people of Chicago love their young. ;-)
I only wish this one was sharper. :-/