Picture of the day - June 13, 2007

The fountain at the Martha Washington Inn

Back in March I took a nighttime picture of Abingdon, Virginia's beautiful and historic Martha Washington Inn. Quite a few people emailed me with some very gracious comments about that picture so I decided to return to "The Martha" last night to take a few more photos. This time I decided to focus both my attention (and my camera) on the fountain that serves as the centerpiece of the front lawn. The image featured in today's picture is the one I liked the most. Nighttime photography is all about proper exposure, i.e. the tricky balance between shutter speed, aperture and sharp focus. My skills in this area are still quite limited, but I'm pretty happy with the results of last evening's effort nonetheless. But then the Martha Washington Inn is such a beautiful building that it's pretty hard to take a bad picture of it! About the photo: After placing my tripod-mounted Nikon D50 with 18-55mm kit lens as close to the fountain as possible, I took a number of shots with varying shutter speeds and apertures in an attempt to find just the right balance between the two of them to ensure a proper exposure while capturing that all-important "flowing water" look. When I got home I copied the raw files to my hard drive, then got to work editing the ones I liked best with Adobe Photoshop Elements. Here are the settings I used to capture this image: Focal length: 23mm Shutter speed: 3 seconds Aperture: f8 ISO: 200 And just in case you're wondering... yes, the duck is indeed real!   Visit the POTD Archives for previous "Pictures Of The Day"!     Submit a photo of your own!            Why I publish the "Picture of the Day"