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Help required with night photography
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Hi guys I had an hour or so spare on Saturday night and decided to try some night photography, and as usual it is harder that it looks.
I noticed a number of things.
1 its hard to focus in the dark
2 Its hard to get an exposure
3 Histograms look different from day time ones.
4 its haard to get horizon level in the darkCan you give me any advice on exposure, reading the histograms and any other techniques.
Why do the lights have the star effect?
I only have a manual 24 mm wide angle lens at the moment
any advice greatfuly received.
Many thanks John.
Not bad at all for a first effort! There’s two types of night photography (ok there’s loads more but lets start with two). One type will have ambient lights, light pollution etc and the other will have no fixed lighting except the sky/moon and perhaps introduced lights (torch/flash).
In a city your looking at the first type so the key here is timing. You need to balance the sky with the street lights and other sources which means shooting straight after sundown until the end of twilight (or after if you want the noir black biased look in B&W). After the end of twilight you get overexposed lights and a black sky, neither are very appealing. That’s all the photos above are missing. You have to over expose the lights to get colour in the sky and the white balance is off. I would shoot in raw and use the slippery sliders to tweak white balance after or get an expodisc (or the old opaque lids from Pringles tubes as used by yours truly!).
The star effect is due to stopping down the lens, you’re using F8 and F11 so it will be more pronounced, its hard to avoid. I dont usually use higher than F7.1.
Here’s one I arrived just a few minutes too late for a perfect balance:
This one’s a bit better:
For getting horizons level, I use a torch in pitch blackness and in cities etc I avoid using the LCD on the back of the camera, its amazing how long that thing blinds you! Also the exposure shown on the playback will be nothing like what you will see on the PC. Trust the histogram instead.
I use manual focusing and just use a torch to check its on infinity. (or you can work out hyperfocal)
In the second type, what I mostly do, your in moonlight or pitch blackness. This doesn’t really suit wide landscapes, you need something relatively close that you can illuminate by torch to focus on and level the horizon with. can be difficult and I find using a torch to get to your location reduces your eyes sensitivity for quite a while, I stand in the darkness for at least 10 minutes before starting to compose. Exposure on these shots can vary by 10, 15, 20 seconds and show little apparent difference in exposure so start with 60 seconds at ISO 100 under full moonlight and vary it up or down according to the histogram.
Here’s an example of the second type I posted here a while back:
Ken when I look at your night shots I can only think of the movie saying “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!!” Fab shots, I’m extremely jealous. If you haven’t already done so you should consider doing a full tutorial on your night techniques. I’d pay to come along to that :!:
Dave
Seconded. Some good pointers there Ken. I’ll try to remember them when I head off to Majorca on my hols in July :D
Stunning pics btw :D
Flash lights and a hot shoe spirit level always help me out.
Once you take a few practice shots with different exposures and apertures you will soon figure out what works.
For me it was a little knowledge and a lot of trial and error.
This shot was as follows – – – – – F/16, 10 sec, ISO 200
It’s not perfect but it’s getting there.Ken, thanks for the very detailed reply on this one, and I can only agree with what has been already said, in fact I think it was one of your photos that inspired me to have a go myself. You have made a number of points that i would like you to expand on if you would. I know what an expo disk is but could you explain how you use the pringles cover? Trust the histogram, I was finding the histogram very confusing it all seemed to be at the left hand side was that because I left it too late and the sky was very dark. How would you go about deciding on the correct exposure for a scene, could you break this down into the inportant steps, do you use the camera meter, hand held meter or take a shot and adjust up or down depending on the histogram. What do you meter off lights sky? I agree the screen dosent give you any idea what you have, these shots were much better when viewed on the PC than I believed I had captured viewing on the LCD. Count me in any time you decide to do a tutorial,or why not start a one here and gauge the intrest.
Very much appreciate your help and thats what makes this such a great community.
Many thanks John.
Sorry John, I forgot where i was for a minute.
I meant torches. For two reasons. The first would be for seeing the controls on the camera.
and the second would be for painting areas that you may want highlighted a little in some shots.Don’t worry about the focus too much. Manual focus about 1/3 of the way in, and shut the lens down to as small as you reasonable can. F16 is ideal as lots of lenses have that as their “sweet spot”, or at least, they start to disimprove when the app gets smaller. With a side lens, 24mm you mentioned, the DOF will be massive.
The lights look fine like that. The only real option is to shoot wide open, but then the DOF will be too small.
wjklewis wrote:
I know what an expo disk is but could you explain how you use the pringles cover?
Hi John, sorry for the late reply! The pringles cover I use is one they dont really sell here anymore, I found one on the ground at a function :) There’s two types, the one we get here now is pretty clear, the older one was opaque. If you can find an opaque one then all you have to do is take a photo of your scene with the pringles lid over the lens. On my D200 I can select in the menus for white balance a ‘preset’. This can be done in two ways, either you take a picture with the pringles lid on and it uses a white balance reading from that or else there’s a ‘use the white balance in a selected photo’ option that shows you the files on the card, you just highlight the one taken with the pringles lid over the lens and it uses that white balance.
Maybe an easier way is to take a pic at the start of shooting with the pringles lid over the lens, then one as you finish (or another in the middle if your a pedant like me!). In Photoshop Camera Raw you open the files taken with the pringles lid and save the white balance on those as a preset and apply it to all the rest of the photos from the same shoot. If lighting changed dramatically you can use one at the end or near the middle. I dont use this too often as the D200 options are easier for me and is applied before I transfer to the PC.
Trust the histogram, I was finding the histogram very confusing it all seemed to be at the left hand side was that because I left it too late and the sky was very dark. How would you go about deciding on the correct exposure for a scene, could you break this down into the inportant steps, do you use the camera meter, hand held meter or take a shot and adjust up or down depending on the histogram. What do you meter off lights sky? I agree the screen dosent give you any idea what you have, these shots were much better when viewed on the PC than I believed I had captured viewing on the LCD.
I dont use a handheld meter, usually not even the cameras meter. The camera meter will give a guide, put the camera on manual and select the aperture you want to use, I go for 5.6 in moonlight to 8-10 in cities. If the camera meter is reading 30 seconds at the selected aperture I try 35 or 40 seconds or whatever I gauge will be right. After a few years of experimenting I can get pretty near on a guess and then use the histogram to check if I’m leaving the shutter open too long or two short. I think the D200 meter will only g oas low as 30″ anyway and just says ‘low’ after than which isn’t much help.
The way I read the histogram is to look at the scene and then the histogram in turn. A lot of talk I see is all about getting the shape of the histogram ‘right’ which is like a humpback bridge, not squashed at either end. I usually have quite a lot of dark in my photos anyway so I think of it like you would music frequencies, bass being dark, light being treble. Normal photographs are ‘supposed’ to be all about lots of midtones or mid-frequencies in my music analogy. Like some songs that sound just great with a lot of bass or even all bass with just some touches of high notes, night photos for me are similar. Lots of dark areas (bass) is ok as long as there are some interesting highs (treble) ie. lights sources and some areas of midtones, your foreground.
So, looking at a night time histogram, first look at how much sky is there and if its a mid to bright sky. If it is going to be quite bright (ie. twilight) then you would expect plenty of midtones in the histogram, a hump in the middle. If the sky is dark then I would expect it to be a bit more crowded to the left. Apply the same to the foreground and landscape.
With all this in mind, the histograms for the last photo above should look like a skyscraper near (but not on) the left edge and a pyramid or another skyscraper near (but again not on) the right with a terrace of flats in between!
Hope that makes some kind of sense, it’s getting past my betime and the post keeps scrolling back to the top so I’ll revisit it if needs be!
Ken
Thanks Ken for taking the time. I will have to have another go soon and try all these pointers.
As a sound guy the music illustration makes perfect sense to me.
Kind regards John
CianMcLiam wrote:
So, looking at a night time histogram, first look at how much sky is there and if its a mid to bright sky. If it is going to be quite bright (ie. twilight) then you would expect plenty of midtones in the histogram, a hump in the middle. If the sky is dark then I would expect it to be a bit more crowded to the left. Apply the same to the foreground and landscape.
Ken, could you possibly post some of your night shots along with its histogram and show us 2 or 3 different ‘types’ of histogram that think are typical for the kind of shots you take? Pretty, pretty please :) :)
Dave
Ken great suggestion from Dave that would be very helpful. Also I would like to do that with a number of my other test shots for compparison purposes could anyone explain an easy to do this, is there a handy piece of software that can do it?
John
wjklewis wrote:
Ken great suggestion from Dave that would be very helpful. Also I would like to do that with a number of my other test shots for compparison purposes could anyone explain an easy to do this, is there a handy piece of software that can do it?
JohnOn a Mac you hit Command + Shift + 3 at the same time to capture what’s on the screen (saves it as a .png). On PC’s I believe all you have to do is hit “Print Screen” or maybe it’s “PRNT SCR” but I couldn’t swear to this.
Dave
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