Desire to improve my night shots

bgarland

I love taking shots like this but I still don't get the crisp results I am looking for. Any suggestions on how to improve a shot like this?

Camera Canon 50D
Exposure Time 10s
Aperture f/4.0
ISO 100
lens Canon 17-55 f/2.8
Focal length 24mm

Shot on tripod with remote shutter release. I used the live view, zoomed in on the city lights to manualy focus this shot.

If you want to look at or play with a full size image, you can download it from this gallery on Smugmug:

http://bgarland.smugmug.com/gallery/8327184_7kFQu/1/545639310_pYAYP

Tim Kamppinen

Well, you basically have a bunch of black shapes in front of some distant specks of light, and there's not much color anywhere in the frame. Shooting earlier will help with the color, like right after sundown. This will also let you use smaller apertures and get more depth of field. Usually just after sunset you can get deep rich blues in the sky. Of course some nights there's just not much color, and maybe that's what happened here. The clouds do look pretty thick (or is it smog? I don't know what city this is so I have no idea).

You'd still just have a bunch of random silhouettes though. If you want a silhouette of something, it's best to keep it simple and clean, and make it the subject of the photo. Otherwise it just looks like needless stuff obscuring your subject. Another option would be to light the trees. If you use a longer exposure (which a smaller aperture will give you) you'll have time to do some light painting with a bright flashlight (spotlights are the quickest, maglites work well too, and lesser flashlights will require you to go over the same spot many times, depending on your aperture of course). Alternatively, you could use a flash and go aroud popping it all over the frame at a low power so that if you overlap in places you don't blow the highlights. You could also gel it to change the color. You could use a CTO gel and set your WB to tungsten. This would make the sky go blue and the forground look neutral or warm depending on what strength CTO you use.

It also looks like there's a lot of noise for ISO 100. Not sure what's going on there, but keep your ISO at its base level. Long exposure shots are prone to noise as it is, so you want to keep your ISO down so as to not add to the problem. If you have long exposure noise reduction in your camera, you can turn it on, but it will double your exposure time because it takes a second exposure without opening the shutter after the initial one and then subtracts the noise from the image. At least that's how it works on nikons...

Tee Why

Couple things, if you use f4 and focus on a very distant subject, that may render the foreground out of focus. Try stopping down to about f8-16.

Second, some of the brushes seem soft but this appears to be due to movement from the blowing wind or something.

Lastly, there is some noise, so I'm not sure if the exposure was off and then adjusted in post processing, which would induce noise. I'd expect well exposed ISO 100 shots to be pretty clean.

Good luck.

bgarland

OK, thanks for the input. I'll practice some more.

dbd

A scene like this has a wide dynamic range in daylight. At night it just gets harder. Here's my take on it.

Stars and city lights have a lot of color, but often appear white in images because of over exposure. In areas like your city lights, the blown out areas coalesce and appear less sharp. This can call for HDR sorts of approaches.

For example, there is a region of lights fringed in green. This is an area lit by mercury vapor lights. the center is blown out and the green fringe is the area around the lights, lit with a greenish tint, but not quite blown out. Tungsten lights and sodium vapor lamps give oranges and yellows. Some florescents are also green.

If you expose the city lights to retain color, the sky will be totally black and you lose your silhouettes, so at least two different exposures to combine. One to get the lights and one to get the sky.

You might try a higher f stop on the less exposed city lights shot to keep it sharp and lower f stop on the greater exposure sky shot to reduce total exposure time and hence, motion blurring. If you do the latter, be sure to refocus on the items that you want to have sharp edges if necessary. Changing f stops on HDR sequences isn't normal practice, I only suggest it here because the light ranges of interest are so far seperatd and there are motion blur and long exposure issues to deal with.

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

bgarland

Good point Dale. I have been playing a bit with HDR and I did think about applying the process to this shot. I'll play with it in Lightroom to see if I can get a few exposures that might feed the HDR processing. Not as good as getting the original captures but good enough to play a bit as a learning tool. Thanks for the ideas.

dbd

The problem with "getting the original capture" is that you have picked a scene where you can't. That's the motivation for 'HDR-like techniques' for the scene you have picked.

Try two images; one with the city lights barely cliping and one with texture just starting to show in the tree bark. Combining the two for the best possible result is a good exercise in postprocessing. If the dynamic ranges don't overlap, shoot more to fill the gap. With three or more you might try a free download of HDR software. If you get satisfying results with 2, try the downloads to see if the HDR software does anything comparable, better or worse. Please let us know the results!

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

Tim Kamppinen

If you really want to create the image in camera, you need to compress the dynamic range of your scene. How do you do that? Well, you can't make anything darker, but you can light the trees with a flashlight or strobe. This will bring up those shadows and reduce the dynamic range of your scene to fit (or come closer to fitting) into the dynamic range of your camera. The one caveat is that it won't help with the difference between the sky and the city lights. You'll still probably have to blow out the lights if you want detail in the sky... unless of course you shoot earlier when the sky is still brighter. If you can balance these three things--the lights, the trees, and the sky--then you can do it in camera.

bgarland

I do have a trail version of Photomatix for HDR processing. I'll play with it tonight a bit and see what I can come up with. I'll post up my results. Thanks for everyone's input.

bgarland

I tried to play with Photamatix and make an HDR image with -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2 exposures. I see some improvement but it’s still pretty noisy.

I obviously increased the exposure considerably in PP before my first post. That did induce some blow out in the lights and added noise. I reverted back to the original unaltered RAW image before working on the HDR attempt.

I still think I need to practice to get a better original capture.

Here is the original:





And the 5 exposure HDR:



And a crop of the HDR experiment: