last saturday night, jason and i went for a photo tour with midwest photo safari. our nighttime tour was at st. anthony main in minneapolis.

we met at 6pm for a brief introduction and initial set-up. don and rebecca, our tour guides, made sure we all knew how to adjust settings on our cameras and got our tripods set up correctly.

the first tip i learned? adjust the exposure compensation in aperture-priority mode. so simple! yet so handy for those times i don’t want to go completely manual.

my dslr is a canon rebel xsi. rebecca saw me shooting the guthrie and the gold medal flour sign across the river, and gave me my second canon-specific tip: set the white balance to “tungsten” to bring out more blue in the sky. voilá!

c’est magnifique!

i was enjoying capturing the light reflections in the water.

then rebecca told me to try f22 to help the lights form more of a star…

i was hooked. (she told me not to go overboard, but! stars!)

we ended the evening on the northern end of the stone arch bridge. i was taking some photos in the middle of the bridge when a bicyclist with a blinking light approached.

see the weirdo dashed line on the left-hand side of the photo? oooh, mystery light…

and? don and rebecca even provide certification after the tour. cute. 🙂

it all felt a bit rushed, but we both got some good tips for nighttime photography, as well as booklet to bring home with even more tips and ideas. jason and i plan to go again on our own sometime — maybe when it’s a bit warmer, too. (jason hasn’t posted his photos yet, but he has one of me all bundled up — hat, gloves, sweatshirt, etc. brr! october in minnesota can be quite chilly!)