There is really nothing more beautiful than Washington DC at night. The plentiful monuments, memorials, and just the architecture of the average buildings there make it quite a sight even in the daytime.

Once a month I join a group to "walk DC at night." In January, I'm going to point out that's not really all that fun: it was 7* last January and I was constantly fogging up my lens. This night, too, on a balmy June, I was still fogging up the lens because at about ten p.m. it started to rain.

The above picture is taken near the "Pennsylvania" column at the World War II Memorial. The Washington Monument is clearly visible, but the Capitol is obscured by another column. Having a slower shutter speed allowed for a nifty misty quality of the fountain. In reality it's quite a big splashy thing.

Night photography has weird challenges, and I strive to meet them like a purist: I don't alter my photos much. I rarely even crop my photos, and the one above is just how it came out of my camera. All my photos from this walk are unaltered. I love looking at HDR, certainly, but I'm not going to do it myself. HDR is a combination process, where the photographer takes three identical photos at the same time (set at different exposure levels) and then uses a program such as PhotoMatix to merge them together (my photo program is Aperture 2, iffin yer curious).

I, personally, am quite more pleased with myself when I look at a photo I've taken and I think to myself, 'hey- I took that GREAT picture'... not.... 'I took a picture made it look great later on my computer'. I admire many HDR shots of course, but since I know how they work, I can usually spot them instantly. Ever seen a wonderful photo of a skyline taken at night.... and it's huge and long and looks amazingly perfect? Well, there ya go. Not my cup o' tea, that. I tend to not mess with nature- I try to capture it just as it is.

I'm a photoshop snob :)

So, all in all I only put up twenty photos I liked best from the shoot. I would have more, except it started to rain and my lens decided it would fog all up. However, I'd made it all the way up to the top of the Lincoln Monument by that point.

You're not allowed to set up a tripod once you get to the top of the stairs there, and trust me, I'm not embarrassed at all to plop on the ground, which is what I did. There were a couple hundred tourists milling about, but I sat right at the feet of Lincoln's statue (right next to the fuzzy ropes) and turned myself into a tripod. That entailed sort of propping my elbows across my knees, so that I could hold really, really still. That was necessary because I didn't want to take a flash shot and have poor Lincoln's statue looking like it was in a bleached spotlight, and the slow shutterspeed would make my every wiggle really obvious. I got a pretty good one, I think. Unfortunately it's hard to get a good frame of reference so you can't tell how monstrously huge the statue is.

My last effort of the night before the camera fogged all up was to lie down next to a column and trip all the tourists. Actually, I was lying on the ground because I put my camera on the ground and I couldn't see otherwise. Once again, I needed my camera to be stabilized but couldn't use a tripod, so, I used the ground. I was sprawled out for a good ten minutes, focusing on the long reflecting pool and the Washington Monument, and in order to really make sure I didn't mess up the photo, I was using my timer. It was kind of funny- I would focus, press the shutter, listen to the beeping for ten seconds, and then sit there for another thirty while I waited for my camera to finish up its shot. It was worth it though, because I got this:

You'll notice that people seem to be ghostly, or blurry. That's because they are moving, of course, and the shot is pretty long. During the day, if you take a long exposure, the people are in the frame for only a split second... and so they disappear entirely. Pretty cool!