Night photography

[RenderedMage]

Hi there.
I've just recently got my camera and have been trying out night photography for the first time. This is one of the few pictures I took at the beach at night, and it looks really horrible. The thing is, it looks so bad I have no idea where to start, so I guessed I'd pop over and ask you guys.

F22, 30sec exposure time, 4 EV+(?) (The more I look at this picture, the more I think it's underexposed. Am I right to say that? I think the composition sucks too.)
One of the first things I noticed was the amount of noise present in the photograph. However, I was confused as to why this was the case as I remembered putting an in-camera ISO setting of 200. Also, the quality of the photograph looks really bad and the image isn't sharp and clear. Does that have something to do with the camera specifications or the improper exposure?
I'm really confused. Any pointers to get my picture up to the standards of those taken by professionals? =/ Thanks!

 

[Marmeduke]

Hi, I think it's a difficult picture to take :er: because you have bright artificial lights which easily become over exposed on a long exposure and a beach scene in low light which really needs a full, long exposure.

The artificial lights on the right look as though they were really strong - perhaps that determined your light meter reading for the whole scene. What was the light meter setting (e.g centre weighted, multi-matrix etc)? If it was set to multi-matrix metering then it probably compensated for the bright artificial light by underexposing the rest (multi matrix averages everything out from across the scene so can be a little misleading). That would also explain why you have an exposure value of +4 but an underexposed image .

Re: unsharpness. It's really easy for this to happen on an exposure of 30 seconds if there is a little bit of wind. Equally, if your tripod is on an unstable surface (which sand can be), a tiny shift in position really shows up. Maybe invest in a beefier tripod?

Yeh at ISO 200 that noise is a bit odd. Is the picture Photoshopped at all? Increasing saturation or brightness, especially on underexposed images can bring up a little of the 'artefacting' - clear signs of adjustments - that your photo has.

Ultimately, for a shot like this I think you do need to give up quality in one area to preserve another. So probably overexposing the artificial light to capture the beach and shoreline is the way to go. But - if you start shooting in RAW it's easy to just make 2 exposures of the same shot in Photoshop and blend them together, here's a tutorial - Digital Photography Tutorial - Creating Multiple Exposures

It's a cool location :thumbup: so I hope you get some great shots of it in the future. Best of luck. Oh, and here is some advice on all things night photography: Night Photography Techniques

 

[Felix 222]

drop the iso A LOT, try a larger aperture, and make exposure brighter

 

[den9]

try F/8 about 5-10 seconds next time.

do a custom white balance, or tungsten

 

[Misfitlimp]

just looked at the EXIF and it says F18 at ISO 400. It looks horribly noisy, try going down to ISO 100. I did not know the 5000 did so horrible in low light.