Beginning Night Photography

Night time photography is my favourite kind, in my opinion it takes more to master a good picture, patience and probably a tripod. When planning shoots, I see a lot more potential in the night - from bokeh to motion blur images you can't go wrong.
Last night I visited Liverpool with a couple friends and tried shooting in a few different places, one thing I discovered with going out at dark is that a lot of success comes from luck - I often just place my camera on the floor when doing a slow shutter, without looking through the viewfinder and shoot. It can mean a long process of trial and error but it's definitely rewarding in the end.

Starting off last night I decided to shoot close ups of trainers, almost like images you see on Crepe City Sneakers Instagram,

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Using a film lens for this image, it took a few attempts to get the trainer correctly in focus however I feel with my normal kit lens, the bokeh wouldn't have been as effective in the distance. 

With it being night time, I went onto attempt a motion blur image however I struggled to achieve any levels within the image as most cars were all the same height - until a bus arrived... 

Ideally, I would have liked these two images to have been one and the blur to be entirely through however getting the balance between shutter speed and aperture is something i'm not that great at, yet. Something I could consider is layering the images in order to achieve that. 

I then also experimented with different kinds of lights and movement, on escalators. 

in order to achieve these images, all I did was place my camera on the hand bar of the escalator and had a slow shutter speed of 1.6, with my camera still but the bar moving as well as the slow shutter it has captured the light nicely, blurry however the centre of the image seems in focus. 

Yet again, experimenting with slow shutter however this time in Central Station, therefore very bright. I did not intend for this to be so successful and just held my camera on the floor pointing around and shooting whenever. With the first image (below) It was completely natural, the thing I like most about this is the movement almost looks like a layered image and I intend to revisit areas like this to reshoot and develop further into topics like this. The second image below was purely luck, just as I heard the train arriving I placed my camera on the floor however with my friend's shoe in the way I thought it was going to be a failure, however, it turned out to be one of my favourites from my entire shoot that night.