Snowfall on the Downs,

During the recent snowfall I managed to get out around 8.30pm to try and capture a night pic (which I don't get enough time to do lately, and I must say, is probably my favourite type of photography).  

I thought it might be interesting to show how quickly and dramatically a scene can change in the space of a minute or two.

Below is a series of 5 pics which I took at around 9 pm at night. I had the camera on the tripod and took a test shot of a 30sec exposure @ f5.6 and 400iso..which is usually the first setting I'd use for a test shot at night, assuming there's a bit of moon

or street light. Then I'll either use a longer exposure, increase the aperture and/or (ideally) lower the ISO. I used a hand torch during the exposure to light up the foreground also, trying not to shine the torch for long in one spot, and trying to avoid any hotspots.

The pics below are unedited, straight from the camera, and were only converted from Raw to jpeg for this. The photos were taken in quick succession and each pic had the exact setting and duration as I said above, but as you can see they have all changed quite a lot. 

In the time it took to expose each shot (30 sec.) the scene has changed. I think the main reason for this is the cloud cover. When the clouds broke, the scene became darker. When the clouds started to pass over, the reflection from the light in the town gave it an Orange/Red glow. Then when the cloud cover was complete and it began to snow, the scene brightened up. The pic looked as if it had been taken in almost daylight.

I always find it amazing how quickly and dramatically a scene can change and when I looked at the results here I just thought it was a great example of why they say ''its all about the light!''. Thanks for visiting.