Brisbane City At Night

A few years ago I went out with a couple of mates to do a night photo shoot of Brisbane. Back then I had a Canon Powershot S3 IS – it was a great little prosumer camera. The photos turned out really good but I was curious as to how my newer Canon 450D would perform?

Brisbane River At Night

The original guys couldn’t make it this time – Liam was overseas and Olger was sick (but we always knew that didn’t we )… so a couple of guys from work came along for a shootout (Jon and Ty).

After having one of the worst dinners I’ve ever had (old pizza from a little pizza takeaway shop at Southbank :/) we headed out to take some shots. We started from Southbank and headed North West along the river.

The full moon was out that night and was brilliant. The city looks so different at night and the reflections of all the lights off the water creates a nice effect. I especially love the Hitachi sign… it creates a massive red plume across the river.

As I expected the photos were so much better on the DSLR… the better optics and Image Stabilization did wonders for the sharpness of the photos… still want a new lens tho

Brisbane Ferris Wheel

Next we moved further down Southbank and took some shots of the ferris wheel. I was playing with the exposure settings to get some exaggerated movement in the ferris wheel. In this shot the exposure was 6 seconds… In hindsight it probably would’ve been better taking the photo from the other side of the ferris wheel as the foreground would’ve been better illuminated… oh well

I’ve never ridden the ferris wheel before… I sort of don’t see the point. Sure its fairly tall and gives a good view of the river and city but is the view that much better? Plus it costs 15 bucks a ride!!!

Thinking about it… a roller coaster around Southbank could be interesting

Buses At Victoria Bridge At Night

We slowly started making our way back to our work building (all of our cars were parked there)… next we stopped at the overpass joining the performing arts complex (QPAC) to the museum.

This shot was taken off that overpass and is another long exposure of the buses coming and going from the bus stop under the bridge. I really love this shot… it gives a sense of how busy the Victoria bridge can be at night. I didn’t count how many buses there were but even at 9pm on a weeknight there were still several buses per minute.

Traffic On James Cook Bridge At Night

Making our way over the Victoria Bridge and back to the CBD. We stopped on the bridge to check out the traffic running along the South East Freeway.

Still playing with the the long exposures and the traffic on the freeway makes a great test subject! On the left hand side we have all of the north bound traffic – you can see the red tail lights streaming into the distance.

On the right hand side we have all of the south bound traffic with all of the head lights streaming towards the camera.

Rocket Bus Near Casino

How about one more long exposure shot for good measure

This was taken at the same spot as the previous photo but is directly behind me. Diametrically in front there is the casino all lit up in bright purple. The end of the bridge here has turns left, right, and straight underneath to the Queen St mall.

This turned out to be a great spot to take long exposure shots as the city bound buses would come over the bridge and take one of those three options. This created some interesting effects!

In this case I’ve taken a long expose (30 secs) and caught a bus coming down for the last 15 seconds or so. The result is these long red tail light trails coming out of the back of a phantom bus… hmm… maybe it should be the phantom rocket bus?!?