Nikon D70 and I am trying to take a night landscape photo without having to have to keep the camera still?

Answer 1

Want to take photos of night landscape without a tripod? Aha.... let me tell you something - foggataboutit. Yup, foggataboutit.

IOW, you need something to keep it steady.

Here is what I do in a pinch: I bought a tripod for $6.00 which is a foldable, 4" variety that stays flat. If you go to a camera store you will see it hanging on the pegboard. Pick one up and always keep it in your camera bag. It is quite small it will fit.

And, I attach it to the camera and rest the tripod legs against my chest or my shoulder blades, hold my breathe when I release the shutter so that there will be no shake. I will hold the breathe for as long as the shutter stays open. (Don't worry, you won't die...!!)

Look at the results. Not satisfied? repeat. Or, repeat it just for the heck of it anyway. This is how great night landscape pics are taken...!!! When you show off to your family or friends, they would say "....John, you're such a great photographer......."

D70 is a great camera. Take advantage of all its features. Skimping on $6 is not doing justice to owning such a nice piece of equipment.

Answer 2

Here's a photo taken at 6:07 PM on 2-25-06. Sunset was technically 5:43 PM that day, so does this count as "night landscape?" It was taken with my D200 using the 18-200 VR lens. I do not have the exposure time, but I am sure that it was about a 4 second exposure. I shut off my car and braced the camera against the "B" pillar, held my breath and squeezed the shutter. I think I rated it at ISO800 to try to keep the noise down. Obviously the VR was turned on. I took this the day I got the lens, just to check it out. I resized the image down quite a bit so it wouldn't take forever to download. You can still make out the geese in the sky, though.

http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/Sunset20060225.jpg

Answer 3

The Nikon D70 does not have the necessary feature to do this, which is called "magic."

It does, however, have a socket to attach a tripod. Buy one. Use it.

Edit: Dr. Sam, that photo is out of focus. Certainly camera shake due to the long exposure.

Answer 4

Forget it. You could jack the ISO up to 1600 and use an f/1.4 lens wide open, but the image quality will suffer and it might still produce shutter times that are too long for hand held. Been there, done that.
Get a tripod or rest the camera on something else, and use the self-timer. You can even improvise an workaround for the lacking mirror lockup feature: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1034&message=14263357&changemode=1