Menorca Night Photography

         I recently had a weeks holiday in Menorca with my partner and his family. I find when travelling anywhere it is a great opportunity to play with new photography techniques. I tend to also take minimal equipment when on holiday thanks to hand luggage restrictions, this motivates me to be creative with what I have. While in Menorca I had a great time doing night photography around the coastline. Below I have listed some tips to help anyone wanting to try this out, I have learnt a few things along the way to make it much easier:

• The 3 photos in this blog were taken using long exposures of 6-10 seconds, in all cases I needed a stable surface to put my camera on. When you don't have a tripod, you can use anything stable and flat as an alternative, just look through the viewfinder or use Live View if your camera has it to check composition. I used a stone step, a wall and the rocks on the floor. I also used my leather camera strap to lift up the lens into the right position so it isn't pointing at the floor (you can use whatever you have to hand, jumper, lens cap, scarf etc.)
• My next tip for extra stability is using timer - I used a 3 second timer so my hand was nowhere near my camera when the shutter opened, this eliminates camera shake so you don't ruin your photo from the beginning when you take your finger off the shutter.
• Use manual focus - autofocus tends to dislike the darkness and will usually struggle to find a point to stick on. Zoom right into the area you want to focus on and then rotate your focus ring until that area is sharp, you can then zoom out to decide on a composition. Live View is great for this as the screen is easier to see in the dark than trying to crouch and look through your viewfinder. 
• For some jazzy starbursts where there are spotlights (above and below images) set your aperture to a nice high number like f16, don't ask me the science behind why this works, I just googled how to do it once as I wanted to try it. I enjoy this effect as it makes your images look like a holiday postcard.
• Setting the aperture higher lets in less light so your exposure will need to be even longer, this gives you a watercolour type effect if you are photographing water which can look really nice, especially when lights and buildings are reflected in it. 
• Shoot in RAW if you can. If your camera has the option to shoot RAW it will gather a wider range of lights and darks in the image, especially important when shooting at night as your camera will pick up more detail.  
• To finish off my travel photos, I usually don't have a laptop so I will edit my favourite RAW files in camera, save as a JPEG and then send via Wifi to my phone/Ipad. I then edit further using the free app Snapseed, which is one of my favourite image editing apps.