Newbie, advice needed

[themoeguy]

Hello to you all!

I a newbie, and am very interested i nightshots. I practice a lot, and I slowly progress...

Please feel free to comment on my own favorite so far, and please give advice as towards improving nightshots. I am especially having difficulties deciding on shutter, and think i might need to start making multiple shots and then merging them in psp because more often than not there is no balance between stars and foreground...?
The trailer is lit by a handheld light.

[doctorjames]

Its very difficult to give specific advice regarding night photography. I am a big fan and have a good go at it myself, but it is often trial and error and making your own techniques work.

I think you have the balance well there. There is a little spill of light onto the trees which is good. I am guessing you used the technique of 'painting' over the caravan where you wanted light, and you have a pretty even and well applied effect here.

Before lighting the caravan, I would have made sure I had the sky correctly exposed with a test shot or two. Then I could move on to lighting the caravan. It is important to note that if you are using a flashlight, or even a flash/strobe/speedlight the shutter speed has nothing to do with exposure of the caravan, only the background.

Hope this helps, but as a newbie I think this is really a pretty good effort, I would certainly be happy with it

James

[Krusty79]

Please include your exif data when you post, per the Critique Forum Rules

We have no idea what shutter speed you used. I have to say, this is a pretty ambitious project for a newbie. I think it normally takes about a 30 second exposure to capture the stars, but they emit their own light. To balance that with a hand-lit object in the foreground is going to take a lot of experimentation. I think you've done a very good job, though. Like you said, I would try bracketing your images and look into doing an exposure blend if you are not happy with the single exposure. Shooting RAW should give you more latitude. I'm not sure what the story is here, but it is an interesting image.

[doctorjames]

In order for the sky to be what you feel is correctly exposed, the shutter speed, aperture and ISO all come into play as with the usual 'exposure triangle'

Once you have the sky correctly exposed, you know what shutter speed you need.

Once you have that set, all you need to do is experiment with how long you need to light the caravan with the torch (probably not all of the exposure) or what power to use on a flash, or multiple flash setup. When you factor in artificial light, the shutter speed becomes irrelevant, especially with flash/strobe, as the object is lit for only a small fraction of the exposure, even at 1/250s

Hope this makes sense. Nothing wrong with ambitious projects, especially if you pull it off like you have done here.

[MitchellProut]

Try shooting on a night with no moon if you want stars in the picture. You have the torch to light the rest of the picture, so play with that. The moon can cause problems with exposing stars correctly.

[MitchellProut]

Also, doctorjames above has very good points about the flash. I'm currently playing with that myself and it is not easy. Don't be afraid to mess it up a few times. Memory is cheap. Trial and error in this type of photography is a very important.

[TNH]

Wow, I cannot do night shots. Mine never turn out. You did a great job capturing the stars!
I can't really help you with the right shutter speed, or merging more than one photo, because I don't know too much about either. But I had a couple of pieces of advice for you anyway.

One thing, if the trailer was more to the right or left of the picture, it would look a lot better. Like the rule of thirds suggests. You wouldn't think that something as simple as following the rule of thirds could help a picture, but it really does!

The trailer there really makes it interesting, but if you cropped it out, it would make a great image, too. Just an idea for you to think about. Like this example-



If you don't like the idea, I can delete this picture.