You may have seen my photos of the Trafalgar Square fountains, taken at about 10pm on a summer night, either here or on Flickr (where there are 5 shots). All of these are fairly long exposures (though short, compared to really long exposure shots, if that makes sense!), displaying the water of the fountains as a smooth, flowing stream. In daylight, of course, you can trap the fountains in a single instant so each drop falling is visible, but at night this simply isn’t possible.

Ordinarily, of course, I would use a tripod to ensure that these long-exposure shots come out nice and crisp. At around half a second long each at f/4 (the largest aperture my 17-40mm f/4L USM will shoot at), it’s not easy to come out with a decent shot. Thankfully, statues, buildings and fountains do – so how to get a nice, crisp shot without a tripod?

• Shoot in continuous mode, in bursts as long as your camera can cope with. While most of these will end up blurred, the chances are that one of a sequence of 6 will end up usable. Of course, this means you need to pay attention to how much space you have left on a card – but you should always be carrying around enough storage just in case!
• Keep your body – and camera – as still as possible. You may want to test what works best for you – but I found myself crouching to stabilise, and keeping my arms in tight and holding my breath to minimise camera shake. For a couple of the shots, I also rested my elbows on the stone balustrades around the square. (You could also just rest the camera on it, of course.)
• Shoot at higher ISO. I don’t like doing this – going above 400 – but depending on your camera, this may produce perfectly acceptable results. Increasing the ISO has the nasty habit of producing noisy images, which I detest.
• Use a fast lens. The fastest I had with me in Trafalgar Square was the 17-40mm f/4, as my 50mm f/1.8 has suffered a bit of an accident recently, but the extra couple of stops would really have helped lower the shutter speed while maintaining a ‘correct’ exposure (by which I mean, an exposure the produces a similar image to what I was seeing). Of course, in this instance, a faster shutter speed would have resulted in less of a blur in the fountains, which is partly the effect I was going for, and at 50mm the shot wouldn’t have been so wide, which is also what I wanted – so it’s swings and roundabouts, really. (Note to self: buy a 16-35mm f/2.8L eventually!)

Anyway, those are just a couple of tips – I hope they come in handy.