Shooting Street Photography At Night In Acapulco. Stupid Idea?

Jul 10

After a week in Mexico City I headed back to Acapulco and I wanted to shoot an episode at night. I’ve mentioned it in an older blog-post that the city is considered to be one of the unsafest in Mexico or even in the whole world. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a try and to be honest, it went very well without any issues.

Again I was shooting the Leica Q2 Monochrom with a Black Pro Mist 1/4 filter. If you look at the ISOs under the photos, they look crazy high but in reality I wasn’t pushing the ISO that much. As you might know, in order to preserve the highlights, you have to underexpose in high contrast situations and bring up the shadows later in post. For instance when I shoot an image at ISO3,200 and it is underexposed by 2 stops and then I add these two stops later in Lighroom, the photo will look almost the same as shooting it at ISO12,800 without underexposing the image. Though, the big advantage is that you can safe the highlights from being blown out which is especially important when shooting a monochrome sensor.

The reason I am mentioning this is because the ISO values you see under the photos represent the settings I was shooting the image plus the adjustments later in Lightroom in case I did any. This way it makes way more sense than just giving you the ISOs without the information about the post processing.

Even after using this camera for almost 1,5 years it still blows me away how far you can push these files and how clean absurd high ISO can look.