Help: Nite Photography

[kencaleno]

My take on night photography:

At twilight, that is from about 30-45 minutes after sunset, is the ideal time to capture night landscapes, just before the sky turns black. Here is where you find the “Sweet-spot”-the balance of natural ambient light and artificial lighting in city scenes. Best to arrive at your chosen venue about 30 minutes before sunset, then you can capture your sunset images first, then wait for the right time for the twilight shots.

A tripod, of course, is mandatory as exposures will be quite long. So, if you are able to lock up the mirror on your camera, this will help with avoidance of shake. If you have a remote control, terrific!-use this, too. If you don’t have either of these functions, just set self-timer for 10 seconds.
Aperture priority; bracket exposures, (1 stop over; One stop under) using shutter speed as the variable unit. Chimp your screen after each shot, to check progress.
White balance, of necessity, will be tungsten, of course, to reinforce the blue sky, and to help de-saturate the yellow artificial light, which can be overpowering. Experiment and try using Fluorescent White balance for brilliant color in the sky. Lowest ISO as usual-at least, at first! Aperture depends-F8 to F11 is the sharpest range for your lens, but you may need to forsake the threat of diffraction, and go for F16 or 22, if you are getting lens flare.
White balance problems can be fixed in post processing whether RAW or JPEG. Ken

[Aegea]

@AJ - your problem looks like either sensor noise (as ressalg suggested) or maybe just fogging from background light from the sky. In the latter case, dropping to a smaller aperture like f8 would help.

[rh89]

@AJ With such long exposures, I think it's pretty much inevitable that noise will creep into your photo, regardless of how low your ISO is or what aperture you're shooting at. Perhaps you might want to consider doing multiple shorter exposures and then combining them later yourself or using software written specifically for this purpose (www.Startrails.de-Home has one such software). The other alternative of course is to simply use film instead.

[A. J.]

Thanks ressaig!

I'll try dropping the ISO, see what happens on these longer shots!!

I appreciate it.

Cheers,

A. J.

[A. J.]

Hi Ken, rh89 and Aegea:

Thanks loads for your insights and suggestions, all of which I will be trying during my next night out beneath the stars!

I appreciate your input!

Cheers,

Al

[macroMe]

i have done several long exposure star trail shots and while long exposure noise is pretty much inevitable and I agree with all of the info that has been offered I am also noting that you say nothing about in camera noise reduction. I always run my camera (Nikon D90) with the long exposure noise reduction on. The up side is that it does clean up the image noticeably (I have a friend with a much higher end camera and the long exposure noise reduction on his camera does a fantastic job), the down side is that for every minute the shutter is open is another minute the camera needs at the end of the shot to run the noise reduction eg:45 min exposure is really 1hr30mins by the time the camera has done noise reduction (which can be a big ask for some batteries).
I have always waited until full dark midnight-ish with no moon to get nice clean shots with a minimum of non-star light.
A friend of mine who is a light trail fanatic has a group of settings that he uses as a formula for his exposures and he worked these out after taking a heap of shots using different settings and finding the combo that works.
Hope this helps to add to your experience
I reckon just keep at it and you'll find which settings work best for you.
Cheers,
Aug

[A. J.]

Hi Aug:

Thanks for the idea, I guess I had completly forgotten about addressing the long exposure noise reduction option in my D300 settings. I'll try with a shorter exposure for practice and see how the battery life holds up in the post-process, once the shot has been taken.

Another item to add to my list the next time I am able to get out on a moonless, chrisp, nite.

I appreciate your comments.

Cheers,

A. J.

[higgo]

Last night i was taking a photo of landscape snow covered ground, low light skyline and every picture i took a shadow of me was in it and it ruined the pictures, i used flash but without it i would not have been able to take the picture. Can anyone help me in finding out why, or how i could get rid of the shadow while taking the photo?

Thanks in advance

[shphoto32]

Just fix it in photoshop or Light room.

[BBenson]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Street lights burn orange. Very orange.

Well, there's lots of different street lights. The "orange" ones are sodium vapor lamps, which emit virtually all of their light at the sodium doublet (atomic transitions) wavelengths of 589+ nm and 590- nm, your eye can't tell the difference. Shooting photos under these means you are using essentially a monochromatic light source. White balance by itself helps a lot but isn't a full answer since different surfaces reflect different wavelengths in somewhat different manners, and there's a lot of solar wavelengths missing

The most popular other street light in the US tends to be the mercury vapor lamp, usually with color corrections via a phosphor. Uncorrected mercury vapor lamps emit mainly the mercury triplets which range roughly 360nm-435nm and appear blueish. The color corrected mercury lamps pump up the red end of the spectrum and have peak emissions running from about 250nm-575nm, which appears "more white" to the eye and the camera. White balance adjustments work better under mercury lamps than under sodium, IMHO

Bob