Night Shots

rbrugman

I've been having a hard time getting night shots to turn out. I never am able to get the right colors to show. My pictures always end up turning red like the one I have included.

My questions is this: How do you tell how to set up a night shot? Should I be using a higher ISO setting, longer exposure time or a combination of the two? Night shots are some of the nicest I've seen of things such as landscapes, but mine always turn out to be highly sub-par.

I am shooting in raw mode so I know some things can be corrected, but I have yet to find a good how-to on setting up your equipment and yourself to take great night shots.



Robert

pyrtek

Have a look here: http://www.thenocturnes.com/

It's a fantastic source of information on night photography.

pathfinder

rbrugman wrote:

I've been having a hard time getting night shots to turn out. I never am able to get the right colors to show. My pictures always end up turning red like the one I have included.

My questions is this: How do you tell how to set up a night shot? Should I be using a higher ISO setting, longer exposure time or a combination of the two? Night shots are some of the nicest I've seen of things such as landscapes, but mine always turn out to be highly sub-par.

I am shooting in raw mode so I know some things can be corrected, but I have yet to find a good how-to on setting up your equipment and yourself to take great night shots.

Robert

If you are shooting in RAW, the colors of the final image are up to you and your choice for color balance in the RAW conversion process.

You could set your white balance to Tungsten; you will then see a warmer image for sure. Or you could use the white eye dropper on something in the image that you know is a light grey tone to set the white balance for you.

Use the lowest ISO your camrea allows. Higher ISO's just add noise at night. Use a good tripod. Have fun

swintonphoto

I agree with previous posts. The red color is due to the white balance settings. These lights that are in the image have a light temp close to tungsten, so adjusting that in the raw converter should help the color issues. Also, I think if you increase your exposure time just a bit that would help make the image feel better. It seems just a little too dark to me.

pathfinder

Search, either on dgrin or Google, is your friend...:D

On Google, type in a few terms of interest and follow it with "colon no space dgrin.com" and the search is limited to dgrin only, rather than the entire web. I had to type out 'colon and no space' because a colon right next to dgrin on this forum yields this -> :dgrin.com, a smiley !! Argghh!!

Andy has a great thread about night shot processing here

I discuss a little about exposure for night shots here and Andy and I discuss night shooting here

Stu Engelman

Hi,

A major problem with night shots is that the ambiant light color is determined almost exclusively by man made light sources, which can vary from red to green to magenta etc. depending on the types of lights being used (tungsten, incandescent, neon, or whatever). You might consider getting a neutral white balance filter like Expo-Disc (see http://www.expodisc.com/products/product_detail.php?prodid=2&productname=ExpoDisc_Digital_White_Balance_Filter_-_Neutral). This device lets you accurately set your white balance before shooting. I use this every time I shoot and am amazed at it's performance.

Changing your exposure settings (like ISO, shutter speed, etc.) will have no impact on recorded color hue, only brightness. The key to your issue is getting a correct white balance. The automatic white balance in your camera can sometimes do an acceptable job for daylight exposures in non-extreme conditions, but I suspect your kind of shooting is tricking the AWB into producing errant chroma shifts (the camera's software can't accurately distinguish between incident and reflected light unless the scene is sufficiently "standard" from a lighting point of view).

Stu