On our third day in Bangkok, Thailand, we spent the day recovering from travelling and then getting up at 4am. We decided to take the day off, catch a nap, and then do a diner cruise on the Chao Phraya River.
They offered quite the assortment of food and drink (which was all very tasty), some classic Thai dancing around the dinner tables, and of course, some rather nice night views of various temples and other buildings. This was my first real night photography, and I decided it would be a good time to work with the EF 50mm f/1.4. I’d used it for a little low-light shooting (bellydance performances mostly) but not for anything nearly this dark. I used Shutter Priority because I knew that if the shutter was too slow, the motion of the boat would blur the pictures. I also knew one of the rules of thumb is for hand-holding to not shoot slower than 1/focal-length, in my case, 1/50th of a second or again, I would likel get blurry pictures..
Most of the time the aperture floated around f/1.8 and f/2, sometimes up as high as f/2.8, and sometimes as low as f/1.4. The pictures from these shoot are what made me realize I needed to take a second think regarding this lens, as it’s really a good starting point and it provides a fair amount of flexibility being such a large aperture. I think I made the right choice with lens selection tonight, these turned out nicely.
