Neon night

Looking up at a restaurant's neon sign and the plants on the upper patio.

Vineland


Ground level




Shone




Lights and shadows




(Notice in the second shot the light reflects off two buildings.)

Up at night



Spiked

Another set of alternate focus shots...


(Silk-floss tree.)

Night ride


Escalator at night.

Today


Hazy sun rising through the smoke of the wildfires.

Going up


Escalator on the southeast corner of California Plaza.

Hanging out

Vines hanging over bars.

Let it out

Extreme close-up of the exhaust vents at the base of one of the downtown skyscrapers.

No stopping

Long shadow of street sign cast by midday sun
reflecting off downtown skyscraper (California Plaza One).

Not waiting on a lady

Evening at the steps at the end of the Willow station on the Blue Line.
(Yes, they go down to gravel.)

Shooter

Water Court, California Plaza.

Drifters

Looking east. No rain.

Stepping down

Bird

Bird statue like piece in a pool in the Citigroup Center in downtown L.A.

Sunrise in four minutes

6:26 am

6:28 am

6:30 am

Morning hunter

Looking down the hill toward Discovery Well Park in Signal Hill, the automatic focus dwells on (what I believe are) cacti in the foreground.

Fair enough.




However, switching over to the manual focus, I captured what I actually wanted to photograph.





Webs illuminated by sunrise.

Dawn

Purple flowers illuminated by dawn's first light.



(Yes, it's supposed to be focused on the flowers in the background.)

The moon-cloud experiment

All were taken with a 22mm focal length (the maximum zoom), focused at infinity, with (I think) the ISO set at 100. Mostly I was seeing what I'd get by playing around with the lens aperture and with the exposure time.


I started with lens aperture at F/7.1, a 1 sec exposure, and got:


I opened up the aperture to F/5.6, keeping other settings the same, and got:


I further opened the aperture to F/4, still 1 second (and same ISO), and compensated with a +0.7 overexposure, and got:


I reduced the aperture down to F/6.3, no exposure compensation, but extended the exposure to 4 seconds (yes), and got:

So, in the end, what I learned is that getting a brightly lit object and dimly lit objects in the same night sky to show up with decent detail on both is way more difficult than it might seem, and takes much more than fiddling with settings.