Night photography??????

[bigcoz]

I read your article today about night photography and the author shared some magnificent night shots. For each shot he gave the f stop & speed. [ f 22 @ 30 sec, f 16 @ 25 sec, f 8@ 15 sec, etc. My question is, how did hr arrive at these settings ? Did he;
- Gain experience through trial & error
- Use some kind of rule of thumb, if so what ?
- or does your in camera light meter give you the settings
- or something else i.e.; how do you do it?

[Tzetsin]

your light meter is pretty much useless at night. well, i'm talking "cant see your hand" dark i guess. in the city it will still work.

For me, all my night shots are trial and error. Mostly the error portion is pretty small these days as i know what i need through experience, but really... it depends on what your wanting to shoot.

[bigcoz]

Thanks Tzelsin

[Hill Country Hack]

Originally Posted by bigcoz

I read your article today about night photography and the author shared some magnificent night shots. For each shot he gave the f stop & speed. [ f 22 @ 30 sec, f 16 @ 25 sec, f 8@ 15 sec, etc. My question is, how did hr arrive at these settings ? Did he;
- Gain experience through trial & error
- Use some kind of rule of thumb, if so what ?
- or does your in camera light meter give you the settings
- or something else i.e.; how do you do it?

I like to do night cityscapes and I use trial and error, more error on my part. I will either meter to the brightest object knowing the others will be underexposed, and hope I can correct in PP (I review the histogram and image in camera, make adjustments and try again). Or I meter to the medium available light and bracket my shots. I can't do layers in Lightroom, so I have to take the best of what I get and work with it.

[bigcoz]

I guess I'll just have to get out there an mess around.

[NathanFranke]

I've got a question: Short of buying a faster lens, how do you get correct focus for night photography (specifically for star trails)? Everything I've found online says to open up to f/1.8 and focus manually--which doesn't help me in the slightest as my fastest lens is f/3.5, and on a clear day I still can't see stars through the viewfinder.

[Tzetsin]

Originally Posted by NathanFranke

I've got a question: Short of buying a faster lens, how do you get correct focus for night photography (specifically for star trails)? Everything I've found online says to open up to f/1.8 and focus manually--which doesn't help me in the slightest as my fastest lens is f/3.5, and on a clear day I still can't see stars through the viewfinder.

First of all. You dont Jack someone elses thread to ask your own questions. no matter how closely related they are. Unless of course the thread is specifically set up open ended that way.

Otherwise... here is a link to the answer of your question.

[ravncat]

There are a few good techniques for getting exposure at night.

1 - Set your camera for it's highest ISO and open your lens as wide as you can if the exposure is under 30 seconds, you should get a meter reading - you can probably use the histogram with live view here. Then simply adjust for an equivalent exposure at a longer time and lower ISO.

2 - Get yourself a gossen lunapro lightmeter. The analogue kind - you can find them on e-bay from time to time. Redirect Notice for example. The old ones will meter down to an 8 hour exposure - just get used to reading it and making incident light readings - which are different from reflected readings.

3. The educated guess. use an exposure table like the one found here Exposure value - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and know that night depending on the amount of ambient light - city street lights, rural full moon light and rural no moonlight will have ev values less than 10, and down to - 5 and lower. (minus 5). If it's a full moon and no other light, start with a -5 ev exposure (iso 100, 2 minutes f1.4) and check the result (histogram is useful here) You'll be able to figure it out by adjusting exposures till you get into a fairly constant range.

[Nicole]

I'm going to go with trial and error leading to enough experience to make a good guess at where to start. I've found that's pretty much how I work. I usually start with a 30 second exposure (depending on if the light meter says that's going to be way too bright, which in the case of night exposure you really learn to read the meter differently since a EV0 exposure I've found is more often than not waaaaay too over exposed).

Part of the thing with night photography that I've found is that I'm not nearly as dependent on timing. Of course, there's trying to take photos during the deep blue sky that comes at twilight, but I'm not photographing things where if I take the shot 3 or 4 times to get it just how I want I'm going to miss the shot.

Mind you, that's just me. All I bring with me for it (aside from the camera) is a tripod and remote and work from there.

[RichardTaylor]

For me It's mostly from experience - and the histogram.

However in cities in the "blue hour" I think "10" to get me in the ball park

10 seconds @ F10 and ISO 100.

I will take an exposure at that then vary the exposure on how the histogram looks.

The other alternative, if you are using a camera with a live histogram on the LCD display, is to use that. You can adjust your settings and get instant feedback via the histogram and (up to a point) how it looks on the display.

You nay find this multi part, on DPD, tutorial of interest.

Night Photography:1 - Cityscapes.