Skylon Tower, originally uploaded by jezza323.

This was taken from our hotel room when we spent the Victoria Day weekend down at Niagara Falls.

Skylon Tower is an observation tower built overlooking both the falls at Niagara. It is quite a sight all lit up at night.

I took this one handheld (I have no tripod anymore – see here for why) but it came out very sharp anyway. I pushed the ISO to 1600 (the highest my old K200D goes) and kept the lens as wide as I dared. The camera’s inbuilt Shake Reduction function also helped a lot for this shot. The exposure was 0.1s @ f4.0. Unfortunately I forgot to remove my Kenko Protection filter, so there are a few slight reflections doubling up in the shot. This happens with night shots as light reflects off the front lens element, then off the inside of the filter and back into the camera.

I edited this single exposure in Lightroom 3. I made use of the Noise Reduction, which is much improved from Lightroom 2. I also played with the levels and gave the shot a slight crop.