I always love shooting city lights on winter nights. The two advantages being, it gets dark sooner and the winter skies have an aura around them. Yesterday evening was the first time I tried long exposures with my digiSLR.
I was pleasantly surprised that the digital cameras do not suffer from reciprocity failure. For some reason, I had assumed that the camera manufacturers would have mimicked all the features of a film camera (and improved on them). What I failed to realize was that reciprocity failure is not a feature of a camera, but is a shortcoming of the film. Reciprocity failure is a characteristic of the chemical make-up of film emulsion at long exposures. Why would a digital camera mimic such a "feature".
The reason I called it a feature is because I always relied on reciprocity failure during my long exposures, and have shot some excellent slides with long trails of car lights or aircraft lights in my cityscapes. Try exposing a cityscape for 3 secs and 30 secs, and you rarely notice the difference in exposure, but for the light trails. Do the same with a digital camera and all you get for 30 secs is a washed out snap. The above photograph of Seattle cityscape was exposed for 2 secs at f5.6 on ISO 400 film setting on my digiSLR.
The lack of reciprocity failure handicapped me in a certain way. I had become so good at using this breakdown of reciprocity with film. Now, I have to find the strengths in my digital camera and start capitalizing them.
What this also means is that I cannot use my digiSLR for astro-photography. I cannot imagine the amount of bloom and noise an hour long exposure would create on a CCD!
I guess I will keep learning more about my digital camera as I experiment with it.