Nocturnal autumn

Autumn colors are here, which you've probably noticed. I so much enjoyed results of an unplanned nighttime shoot in Garfield Park last year at this time, that I did it again Wednesday, as I strolled to and from the weekly meeting of the Indiana Photographic Society, which meets in the Garfield Park Arts Center.

What you see in this post are the results, using my hand-held Canon PowerShot G12, which has built-in image stablization, allowing me to dare to hand-hold the camera for these single-frame shots at shutter speeds as slow as a half-second @ ISO 800.

Like last year's nocturnal shoot, it was raining on the trip to the meeting Wednesday, and you should be able to distinguish those pre-dark shots from those taken afterward. Rain had stopped by the time I trekked home, but the grounds and walks were very much wet and, in some places, puddled. Having that water sheen effect was what I was most interested in exploiting in the after-dark shots.

I haven't created a gallery for these, but these are pretty everything of substance from the shoot.  Leading off the post is one version of a shot taken of the backside of the MacAllister Center for the Performing Arts, the park's very nice amphitheater and site of the recent Garfield Shakespeare Company's fall production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which you read about here if you follow this blog regularly. That photo was taken standing upright.

Immediately afterward, I sat down on the sidewalk (using a freezer bag to separate my seat from the pavement to keep me dry) to get a slightly lower vantage point. That photo appears immediately below; notice the size of the puddle in the foreground diminishes, for example.