Photographing Like a Pro at Abu Dhabi's Grand Mosque

So - I thought I'd be able to use a tripod at the Grand Mosque.  Turns out you can't (or at least I was specifically told "no" by security upon entering... and then saw some other guys using them.  I guess my beefy carbon fiber Manfrotto looked more ominous than the $15 Walmart quality ones).  So, I had to figure out how to still create great images without doing anything disrespectful.  I found there are many benches around the mosque area where you can tastefully sit a camera and use live view to compose the image - then set up a multiple second exposure.  Like this one!

Nikon D300s
18-105mm @18mm
ISO 125
2 seconds
f/11
Cropped in Lightroom

Hand Held - Nikon D300s, 18-105mm @ 48mm, 1/30th, f/4.8, ISO800

I prefer long exposures sometimes, even when hand held is possible, as it gives you visual opportunities that are otherwise not going to be captured.  By leaving the shutter open longer, I am able to use a smaller aperture and thus have more details throughout the depth of the image.  A second reason is that anything moving becomes a blur, or disappears.   Do you see the cleaning guy pushing his cart in the above image?  Nope - but he was there, in the frame.  Check out the water too - it appears to be as still as a mirror, allowing the reflections to shine beautifully.  If I had a shorter exposure, you would see more ripples in the water, which would change the mood of the piece (which is very much personal taste).

The image on the right is shot hand held, so I obviously did not use a two second exposure.  I was able to hand hold this at 1/30th of a second (which I'm quite proud of, as anything longer than a 60th becomes very difficult).  Check out the water - you can see the ripples, where as the top image is smooth as glass.  Personally, I prefer the longer exposure.  Another positive of a long exposure is being able to use a lower ISO.  You can see a bit of image quality loss in the image to the right vs the top, as I used ISO800 (though Lightroom's noise reduction ability is somewhat amazing and has cleaned it up well).

Nikon D300s, Handheld, 1/45th, ISO640, 18mm - 18 images.

We entered the mosque and in front of me was a chandler so large that it has a spiral staircase inside for workers to clean it!  I wanted to get a neat perspective, but there were so many people walking around, and it was a very very tight space to work in.  I opted to make a panoramic image so I could show more of the room than just a few pieces that my 18mm lens could capture in one frame.  I also wanted to get a final image without all the people, so I shot 3 frames for each of the frames used to make the bottom of the panorama - then I layered the images in photoshop and removed the people.  Finally I stitched together all the frames and created this vertical panorama.

Again - no tripod.  I had to come up with a way to get some depth of field, but I knew I could only hand hold each frame a a max of 1/45th, f/3.5 - so I opted to focus at different points within the frame, and using photoshop, blended the images together to get a very nice depth of field.  All total, I used 18 images to create this frame.

No crazy ideas for the image below - just straight up sat on the rocks by the water with a tripod and made a panorama!  Actually - once we left this spot, my daughter said "Daddy!  No Shoes!" ...  She had thrown her shoes out the window.  So we went back and got them!  Oh the joys of a toddler!

Nikon D300s, Manfrotto Carbon Fiber tripdo, 32mm, f/9.5, ISO100, 6 second exposures, 8 frames.  Stitched, cropped, noise reduced in Lighroom CC.