Removing bright spots from day shots at night

[mattmega4]

I am trying to take pictures at the dead of night but make it look like it was taken during the day. It is a challenge from a Gizmodo from a week or two ago.

Anyways I purchased a Nikon D3100 and have been playing around with various settings and snapped a few pictures and I am getting the lighting right..in other words it looks like it is daylight out. BUT my issue is that everything in the picture that has light source in it ie building lights up like it is las vegas

I am hoping to be able to get the result without Photoshop as that is not the challenge i want to tackle.

I have a shutter release cable in the mail so that will remove any blur, but again I am trying to remove the massive glare from things that have light sources

the settings that i used for the pictures that i took are:
Nikon D3100
Lens Vr 18-55mm F/3.5-5.6G
Jpeg Fine/NEF (RAW)
AF Area Mode: Wide Area
VR: ON
Aperture F/3.5
Shutter Speed 318.8s
Exposure comp: -0.7ev
metering matrix
iso: 100 (i have done 200 and 400 as well)

if you need anymore info let me know

here are 3 pictures
the first 2 are at very similar settings i might have held down the shutter longer on the first picture and i think the first picture was at 400 iso and the 2nd was 100..

http://i700.photobucket.com/albums/w...4/firsttry.jpg
http://i700.photobucket.com/albums/w...nalGangsta.jpg

[Liz Caldwell]

I'm not sure there is a fix for that... I suppose you could try aligning a piece of paper in front of the lens where the bridge is, once you've got the bridge properly exposed... maybe...?

[ceremus]

You can try editing the RAW files with Lightroom or the standard software (not sure what Nikon offers) and try seeing if anything is recoverable from the highlights, or at least knock them down a bit.

For the most part though you're not really going to get rid of that, a clear light source picked up by the sensor will become overexposed given a long enough exposure, unless you can control it directly (IE turn it off once you get the exposure you want from it).

Do you have a scene you can capture that doesn't have so many light sources coming from it and just pick up the ambient light? I've seen good results of this being done with a full moon out.

I recently talked about this on my blog, but on a good moon lit night, it’s fun to create the illusion of photographs being taken in daylight but with the added effects that come with slow shutter speeds. This is a photography I took in Hawaii around 10pm on a dark night. The moon was out in full, so by letting my camera soak in the light for about 30 seconds, the colors start to appear in full vibrancy. When I took this shot, because it was so dark, I had no idea someone was sitting out on the rocks star gazing. If you live near the ocean, I love the dreamy look it gives to the moving water, rendering the waves almost like low-lying clouds.

Read more: Slow Shutter Shoot-Out – 3 Slow Shutter Speed Techniques

[Hill Country Hack]

A graduated neutral denisty filter?

[zona5101]

My suggestion would be to dodge the exposure as you make it...just as you would in the darkroom. ...even to the extent of using a small piece of black paper on a stick - only instead of dodging the paper under your easel, your dodging out in front of your lens.
Otherwise you will be limited to what ever you can get done in post.