Night shot (sorta) of traffic December

…And slow shutter speeds.  This is something that’s typically the domain of SLRs, not cruddy point-and-shoot cameras.  And yet, here we are.

Under normal circumstances, it’s easy enough to get a slow shutter speed – just turn off the flash in a dark area.  In this case, that wouldn’t have worked.  To capture the ambient light as dark as I wanted (which is to say, as it was, not as the camera wanted to interpret it), I had to override the shutter speed, make it slightly faster than the sensor wanted to.

How?  Well, I could have (and did) used a faster ISO.  Maxed that out, but it was too fast.  So I used a known hack (CHDK project) to manually control the shutter speed.  This was taken at 1/15th of a second, f/2.8 at the widest angle settings of the lens.