Night Photography~Unseen Beauty

Did you have any idea what beauty lies in the darkness?

I recently saw some shots at Flickr that had Light Painting and Night Photography.

Intrigued, I decide to do some research and reading on the subject.
Night Photography is absolutely fun and creative.

So of course I decided to try some of my own.
I went out at dusk. The light was poor...
My first shot was hand held with my point and shoot and of course not timed...it turned out poorly, but editing did help.
Experimentation in mind ~~ I drove down to the valley and parked alongside a small bridge over what we locals call Black Bottom Creek.
I set up my tripod and camera while in the car with the dome light on...too dark outside for this...and I'd forgotten a flash light!
Exposure on manual...
15 seconds.
F stop at 5.6.
Push the button, swat madly at the mosquitoes...
and you get some lovely shots!
See the headlights from the traffic on the highway [top of photo]?
These photos were taken after sunset...in the dark. I think 8:50 was the time I took this one.

My Nikon battery was on low, so I headed towards home, but stopped at another bridge over Black Bottom and decided to see how long of an exposure I could pull out of my Point and Shoot camera.

This is 4 seconds [fireworks mode]....on a tripod...
Not the worst, but I could see that a 10 second exposure would have worked very well.
At the top of the ridge, I decide to give the little pocket camera one last try...
I was not disappointed.
A tripod is really quite necessary for these kinds of shots. This last one, I simply put the camera on the top of the car and used a 2 second delay to get this.

Night photography is really a beautiful bold world...
Charge up those batteries!