Night-time Street Photography #1 - My Preparation

Okay so I bought the CineBloom filter lens and a cheap soft diffusion filter from Shopee. I wanna try it out mainly to emulate that CineStill 800t film stock look where the lights get those halation, just out of curiosity. Naturally, I'll be shooting a lot of lights and signages at night. Also, I'm gonna be doing all this without a tripod cause I'm too timid to randomly prop up a tripod and casually shoot, which I'm considering doing in the future.

Now, there's a lot of things I need to take into consideration when shooting at night. Will there be enough light? Will my pictures turn out soft and blurry from my dumb shaky hands? Will I even nail the exposure? If I'm gonna do it, I gotta at least know what I'm doing right? So I had to read up and do some Youtube binging before I randomly snap pics that I'll probably end up not liking.

From reading and watching some vids here's some stuff I gathered and how my settings are gonna be for the most part:

1. Aperture wide open

2. Shutter speed <1/90th of a second

3. Max out the ISO???

Aperture

This one's kinda obvious right? Wider aperture allows more light and I need as much light as I can get. What if I find a shot that would look good if the whole picture is in focus? Then I'd need a smaller aperture and slower shutter speed right? Well tough shit, I don't have a tripod, it'll be a blurry mess now let's move on.

Shutter Speed

So I saw this one video where the dude is shooting without tripod at 1/15th of a second??? No way my hands are that steady. Another video, the guy suggested anywhere between 1/100 s -1/200 s (then again he's talking about digital photography, idk if that makes a difference). I'm not taking both their advice. Instead I'm gonna mostly shoot 1/90 s because I literally searched "What's the slowest shutter speed without blur" and here's what I got.

I trust Google completely.

In all seriousness tho, if there is any place for me to lean on or rest my camera on, I'll take it and slow down my shutter speed accordingly.

ISO

Now this one I'm kinda undecided... Bumping up the ISO will give me a brighter image but it also adds a lot of grain. Especially considering I'm gonna shoot a lot of bright lights, there's bound to be really dark shadow areas that might produce a lot of grain. I'm thinking of pushing it maybe 2 stops? I'll most likely be using my good old Superia 400 film stock so I'll be compensating it to 1600 ISO. Hopefully it'll turn out alright

That's about it. I'll give an update and a comparison between the CineBloom filter and the cheap Shopee one once the pictures come out!