Ancient and Modern - Truro by night

mgd_harvey

Hi all.

I'd be interested in your thought on this shot please.

DoctorIt

It's a nice scene, I like the composition, and I can tell that the reflection in the water will be nice, but there's some technical points you need to address.

1. the yellow/orange cast is very unflattering
2. your exposure is probably a bit too long - there's quite a few blown out areas. night shooting is tricky, you may have to do some stacking or combining of shots. Or some selective RAW processing.
3. a bit noisy, or is it just me? probably a result of the super long exposure, see above.

what were your settings, maybe that will help us more? f/stop? shutterspeed? ISO?

mgd_harvey

DoctorIt wrote:

It's a nice scene, I like the composition, and I can tell that the reflection in the water will be nice, but there's some technical points you need to address.

1. the yellow/orange cast is very unflattering
2. your exposure is probably a bit too long - there's quite a few blown out areas. night shooting is tricky, you may have to do some stacking or combining of shots. Or some selective RAW processing.
3. a bit noisy, or is it just me? probably a result of the super long exposure, see above.

what were your settings, maybe that will help us more? f/stop? shutterspeed? ISO?

Thanks for the comments.

I actually liked the yellow/orange cast as I felt it added to the night feeling of the shot. I'll have a look at correcting it and see what I think.

I have brought one area (the shop name) back in using a section from a differently exposed raw conversion - I realise there are more, but I plan on going back to take this shot earlier in the evening while there is still a little light in the sky - so I didn't really want to spend too long on this shot - I'm using it more as a learning process as I go. I got my DSLR at the end of August this year and I'm still learning the art of pp. Further to go, always

This shot was taken at 50mm, f8 and an 8s exposure at ISO100. I then put +3 exposure compensation in RSE (probably accounting for the noise) and -3 ec for the second alyer with the shop sign. I took several shots, from a 1s exposure to 15s to give me the option of blending if needed and I could figure out how (I use the GIMP instead of CS2)

Thanks for the comments on the composition. That's roughly where I want to shoot from where I revisit it but I want to time the hour after sunset with high tide and no wind.