photoprofessor:

How To / Hand Held

You can find a cool photo anywhere, this one is a hand held night shot from the lights that wrapped around the rail on my front porch. I shot this photo using aperture priority mode so I selected the aperture and my camera did the rest. Sometimes this works well, others you will have to manually set everything to get the image you want. 

The way I shot it hand held was to use spot metering with selective focus and meter right at the brightest point of the light I was focusing on. My camera selected a high ISO - 1600 for greater light sensitivity that in conjunction with a large aperture - f1.8, gave me a faster shutter speed. That faster shutter speed is what enabled me to shoot it hand held and get no motion blur. The large aperture I chose is what gave me the shallow focus / depth of field and cause the background lights to blur to bubbles. Try it out!

1/500 sec./f1.8/spot meter/ISO 1600  

Photo by John Drake