Toronto Light Festival (January 18th to March 3rd in the Distillery Historic District) was the first time I used blue light photography( is the process of taking photographs during the time of the day that is known as the blue hour. The blue hour occurs before sunrise in the morning and after sunset in the evening.) The photos showed the light source and the background of the city. video link : https://youtu.be/1cz9q8ZdgWk
Hello @elaw_Toronto ,
Welcome to Connect!
Thanks for sharing these beautiful photos! Can you share with us what camera you used to capture them and perhaps explain the settings? I am sure that it will be useful for newbie photographers like myself.
I am also eager to hear your experience from this place, is it some kind of a festival? If you add more details to your post, it can be appreciated even more by other Local Guides.
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Toronto Light Festival ( https://torontolightfest.com ) held in The Distillery District (https://www.thedistillerydistrict.com ) during the cold, dark days of winter. It was FREE to attend and I encouraged people of all ages to came out from the cold and dark into the warmth of the light. Night photography can be much more rewarding than photography during the day. Because everything looks different at night, you don’t need to go somewhere exotic to get great pictures. I used Nikon D610 with tripod. ( to stabilize your camera and give me the choice of low ISO to keep away the digital noise ) The first tip is to make sure you are shooting in Manual mood. In Manual mode, you will set the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. The second is shooting in Blue Hour will lower the contrast between the highlights and background with less exposure time in compare to the same location with complete bark background ( an hour after blue hour)
Awesome shots. The blue hour is great source of images if you find an appropriate object at that time indeed. I have also wondered if ISO should be high when doing fire-dancer photos?
I usually arrived on location an hour before the Blue hours. Walk around and make up a shooting list of appropriate objects to shoot within the Blue hours timeframe ( around 30 -50 minutes ). For the fire dance photo I use ISO 125 ( ( to keep the digital noise to the minimum ) at F.7.1. The shutter speed is 1.6 sec to produce a patten of light. The blurry performers give a sense of motion. The objective is to have sharp foreground and background within the dynamic range with highlight and shadow details to show the mood and the time of the day.
Hm, thanks for the composition and set up advise @elaw_Toronto ! I will definitely try that. My previous experiments were a complete failure and I guess that practice at least 50% of the whole thing ![]()
Beautiful pics. I love light painting. Thanks for sharing.



