The theme for 52Frames this week was “City by Night” with an extra credit “5 seconds or longer”. So I took my tripod outside of the apartment for the first time – which made me conclude that, although I do love my Manfrotto for studio work, I definitely need a more portable tripod if I want to move around with it.

I started my walk at Lindenhof to get a view of the Limmat, the University and ETH.

I also got a picture of a rare ghost tram!

On the other side, Grossmünster and the colorful lights from the Kantonspolizei building.

Then, I strolled along the Limmat, taking the picture that’s on top of this post (and that I submitted for 52Frames), as well as this more accidental one (I probably shot in the tripod in the middle of the exposure, although I don’t remember it…), that I ended up liking quite a lot 🙂

I ended my stroll at the lake, looked at the pier…

… as well at the other side of the view in direction of the Opera.

I believe that, for a first try at tripod night photography, it was pretty good. The pictures I got are not very original, but they’re from a technical point of view not bad, and I’m even happy with them 🙂

All of these were exposed at 30 seconds on ISO 100 and with a f/stop that would allow me to get a reasonable exposure (f/13, f/14 for these ones, although I experimented a bit more than that). Hardware-wise, my Pentax K-1, mounted with my 24-70/2.8, my Manfrotto 055 tripod with a ball head. I had a neutral density filter in my backpack because I didn’t know what would be the conditions for “long exposures” (which I wanted), but I didn’t need it. Oh, and a cable release – I wouldn’t have expected to use the remote and the cable release as much as I do when I bought them 🙂

The full album (which I posted in its entirety here) is available here: Zürich by Night – February 2019.