The night breathes

Anyone who's been paying attention (and I appreciate both of you) will have seen me mention how much I love taking pictures in the city at night.  I'm generally useless when it comes to actually creating good lighting conditions for my pictures, but city lights provide a seemingly endless parade of interesting lights if you're willing to bring along a tripod drag out your shutter speed.

Of course I am a rank amateur in all matters photographic, so every time I head out with my camera is a learning experience in some way shape or form.  Typically I get very few shots taken on a given night and each one will be taken with a specific goal in mind that I may or may not achieve.  If you, kind reader, are inclined to indulge me I'd like to share the results of my latest night of picture taking with some mundane dialog about the goals, achievements, and failures of the shots.  I haven't done any editing or post-processing on these at all except to resize them.

Downtown - Edmonton, AB - November 2010

Downtown - Edmonton, AB, November 2010

The views of downtown were fairly normal shots for me, I generally just aim for good depth of focus and nice composition.  I like the composition of these shots, but I was less than pleased with where my focal plane ended up (I seem to have trouble manually focusing on distant buildings) and I wish I would have gone with a longer shutter speed to brighten them up just a bit.

Tree under a street lamp - Edmonton, AB - November 2010

I took this picture entirely because I liked the way the street lamp was lighting the tree.  Not entirely happy with the composition I got (completely displeased that I didn't avoid the car in the lower right) but other than that I got the effect I was going for.  The tree is focused well, the brightness is right, and I love the way the street lamp is shining.

Lighted path - Edmonton, AB - November 2010

This shot is pretty much exactly what I was going for, just a look down the path.  I'm very pleased with the composition, brightness, and focus, though closing up the aperture and drawing out the shutter speed to get more depth of focus and maintaining this brightness would have been good.  Overall it's probably my favourite picture of the night.

Park Benches - Edmonton, AB - November 2010

This is my other candidate for favourite of the night.  I'm not really sure what specifically it was about this scene that I was trying to achieve, perhaps how the benches seemed like a sanctuary, but whatever it was I like how it came out.  If I was doing this shot over again I wouldn't change a thing.

Park Benches - Edmonton, AB - November 2010

The benches also had an interesting shape a design, which is what I was trying to convey in this picture.  I'm not sure I achieved that but I certainly am pleased with how it came out, especially the intricacies of the bench and the wall.  I don't think I would change anything in this shot, but I might take another with different composition to frame the benches in the manner I was hoping for.

Lamp post decoration - Edmonton, AB - November 2010

All of the lamp posts were banded like this with two different phrases on each post, I really liked the way the light played on them.  I was actually trying to get a very narrow depth of focus on this one (strange for me) to get bokeh on the words (ie. have it focused in the center of the words but blurred toward the ends).  I failed in that respect (even the wall in the background isn't terribly blurred) but it ended up being a nice shot anyway.

Overall I'm fairly pleased with the night's pictures, even if I didn't quite get what I was going for with all of them.  I'd love to hear any and all feedback on them, so please feel free to comment!  I have these pictures available in better resolution, with some metadata included, in my Gallerama gallery