You won't often find me shooting in low light without a tripod. Last week, though, I had no choice but to do so. The holiday light show at the Chicago Botanic Garden is a no-tripods-allowed event, even though they don't have issues with photographers bringing them in any other time of the year. 

Already wondering how difficult it was going to be to make good photographs after dark without the stability of a tripod, the day dawned with a high wind warning. Just a little something extra to make things more interesting.

They weren't kidding, either.

With gusts in the 45-50mph range (all night long), it felt more like Western Wyoming and/or Eastern Idaho than suburban Chicago. Especially out in the open near the garden's large water features, the wind was aggressive. Can you say "camera shake?"

I brought a single lens: 24-70mm, and planned on shooting wide open as much as possible. My Nikon Z8 performs well at high ISOs, but noise is unavoidable once you get past a certain point - and I had a feeling I'd have to bump it way up in order to keep the shutter speed high enough to generate sharp images. 

For point of reference, I almost never use an ISO higher than 3200. On a tripod shooting landscapes, I generally set the camera as low as it can go (64). To capture Lightscape, I'd have to venture into five digits.

That's crazy talk! For me, anyway.

Our entry tickets were for the first available time slot at 4:30pm, which is right around the time the sun sets. If we were lucky, we'd have a narrow window to work before the sky turned completely dark. 

In reality, it was almost no time at all: a snow squall moved through just as we entered. In spite of the heavy overcast, there were a few minutes of deep blue sky and a snippet of sunset color. 

Surprisingly, a few of the installations were so brightly lit I didn't have to go quite so far into the stratosphere with the ISO, and could use a faster shutter speed. 

The results were better than expected. Scroll down to view a few of the images made that evening. Camera data is included so you can see just how high I had to push the ISO. In spite of that, the level of noise was acceptable, and Lightroom was able to handle most of it.

If you're wondering why in the world anyone would bother trying to make photographs with a "big camera" in conditions such as these, the phone can do a lot of things, but can struggle to reproduce high contrast light shows accurately. Also, in spite of the constraints, I was still able to do things creatively with the Z8 that would not have been achievable with the phone.

If you live in the Chicago area or will be visiting, Lightscape runs through January 5th. The lighted path is a little more than one mile long, and 80% of the installations are new this year so if you've attended previously, it won't be a rerun.

For tickets and more information, follow the link:

Chicago Botanic Garden Lightscape

1/100 sec; f/5.0; ISO 10000

1/125 sec; f/5.0; ISO 16000
 

1/60th sec; f/5.0; ISO 6400
 

1/60th sec; f/7.1; ISO 20000
 

1/125 sec; f/7.1; ISO 20000
 

1/125 sec; f/7.1; ISO 16000

Landscape photographers tend to work on tripods and use the lowest ISO possible. Setting the camera at a six-digit ISO is, for me, laughable. Still, the Z8 handled it. 

I was kicked out of my comfort zone but it worked out pretty well in the end.