I took a bunch of pictures of Baldwin Hill at night
I am trying to get better at taking pictures with a camera!! So I took the camera I use to photograph plants and bugs and headed to Baldwin Hill, a large and native-plant-heavy park in Culver City which I've blogged about before. It's always completely covered in people exercising, even at midnight, so it's a very safe and fun place to go lurk around and photograph after sunset.
I brought a small but powerful flashlight and a flash for my camera. I am not a big expert at night photography but I just took a fuck ton of pictures and tried to figure out where to set the white balance and experimented with lighting subjects, foreground surfaces, and background elements, like trees, using my handheld flashlight. These are all "straight out of the camera".
An evening primrose:
Culver City, West LA, and Century City, with the Mormon temple on Wilshire in the background:
The cell tower on top of the hill:
An area which was closed for plant rehabilitation. It looks mundane but I am proudest of this one because this was the one I had to put the most work into to get any image at all:
I still am not amazing at predicting exactly what is going on with my camera but I think I'm getting better! I want to be better at photographing plants and bugs at night because that's often when I have free time coming back from the office.
I did photograph a ton of plants and two big spiders that I haven't shown here. They're easier to photograph than some of these nighttime landscapes for sure!