This shot had a shutter speed of 0.8 seconds. I nearly always shoot in aperture priority mode, so my real camera setting here was f/5.6 with a 100 ISO. It situations like this, or nearly any other for that matter, it's important to listen to the camera. With a DSLR you can hear the mirror flap up, pause, and flap back down. The camera will tell you the shutter speed is slow if you just listen. Here, all I needed to do was just brace the camera. I took some shots with the bottom of the camera resetting on the rail. (I usually press down with my left hand on the hot shoe/prisim area while my right hand fires the shot.) I also pressed the left had side of the camera against a column and took some shots.

If you look closely you'll see that at 8 tenths of a second some figures are mostly sharp while others are blurred. That means you want to take a lot of shots and edit them later. You can't really tell when you're going to have blurs you don't want and ones that add to the scene until you can view them much larger on a computer later.

This shot was recently licensed to a magazine in South Korea.

When I revisited D.C. last year to update my stock photography archives, I made a point to get over to the Frederick Douglas house and the Anacostia Museum. I took the subway to the other side of the river and a bus to the Frederick Douglas house. From there, following some directions given to me at the information desk, I decided to walk to the Anacostia Museum. Here's a travel tip: It is a long, long, LONG walk UPHILL!. I remember finally getting to the museum, asking for the water-fountain (they couldn't believe I walked it) and then going to the restroom to wipe all the sweat off with a wet-paper-towel bath. Then I find, what a surprise, no photography is allowed inside the museum! I can only blame myself for not doing enough research on that one. The museum is very dark inside anyway. It would have been difficult to get anything decent without at least setting up a tripod, not to mention other lights. I salvaged what I could with some outside shots. The shot above is not an architectural photography masterpiece but sometimes you just have to be happy with whatever you can get.