Downtown shoot at night

[rickw262]

I am going to our downtown area (think Main St, USA) lit up with shops, Christmas lights, street lamps, etc at night, lots of shoppers. I have a Canon 60D and am debating using the 50mm prime 1.4 lens or the kit 18-135mm 3.5-5.6 lens. A tripod is just not practical as a group of us will be walking around and am wondering on your recommendations for aperture and shutter speed and ISO. I don't want the shoppers to appear all blurry and I want the scene to look like it is night and have all the nice lights showing clearly. I am thinking I need something like 3.5 aperture with 1/40 shutter speed and ISO around 1600 (or more) for the kit lens at 18-24mm FL, and maybe 2.8 aperture 1/60 shutter and ISO 400 or 800 for the prime lens.

Am I way off base here? Thoughts?

 

[Parker219]

Every downtown area is different, since you will be the only one there then just go and experiment. Post the pics after so we can see how you made out.

 

[rickw262]

Every downtown area is different, since you will be the only one there then just go and experiment. Post the pics after so we can see how you made out.

Unfortunately I am "leading" a group of amateur photogs on a little tour downtown and just want to appear to have a little idea that I know what I am doing!

 

[keith foster]

I would make a trip downtown before groupe excursion night so I could speak intelligently about what I did and found that didn't work and what did.

 

[rickw262]

It's tonight!

 

[KmH]

To keep walking people from being blurred you need a shutter speed of about 1/250. Their arms and legs move faster than their torso, so as you make shutter speed longer blur starts at the ends of the legs/arms. At 1/40, a walking persons torso would be blurry, and without a tripod it's quite possible any photos you make would also have handheld camera shake blur.
Apparently, you're not very familiar with your tripod. It shouldn't take more than about 60 seconds to set it up so it's nice and level.

Another issue will be white balance, because each light type has a different color temperature, but the camera's white balance can only be set to one light color temperature at a time.
Consequently, you would want to set the camera white balance to the color temperature of whatever light type is dominant in the scene.

Use the camera histogram to judge exposure, but it's OK for specular highlights to be somewhat clipped (blown out). A lot of the lights in the scene will be specular highlights.

Hopefully, you're familiar with the concept of a stop and how a stop relates to making exposure adjustment.
For example 1/250 is a 2.5 stop shorter shutter speed than 1/40. Since 1/250 lets in less light, to maintain the same exposure, ISO and/or lens aperture have to changed to let in 2.5 stops more light. If you want a brighter exposure using /250, more than a 2.5 stop change would be needed.

2.5 stops more than ISO 1600 would be ISO 9600, and 2.7 stops more than f/3.5 lens aperture would be f/1.4.

 

[rickw262]

Thanks for the detail. I am learning (slowly) about the stops. As for the tripod it is just that with so many walkers we would really be getting in peoples way with it sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. I had planned on using AWB to start and then maybe changing from there based on how it looked. Thanks for the response.

 

[weepete]

I could be way off here but your depth of field looks way off to me. At those apertures you'll need to have a main subject in the foreground and everything else will be out of focus, which doesn't sound like the kind of shot you have in your head. I reckon you'll need an aperture of at least 5.6 but more likely somewhere around 8-16 to get the dof you want. Shutter speed will need to be 1/60th of a second minimum for hand held shots (and even at that you will need really steady hands), and you'll need to go faster if you zoom in, and at these settings you will have blur from anything in motion. If you shoot at around 1/250th it should be fast enough to freeze most things. ISO wise use whatever will get you nearest these settings, if that means bumping it up to high or whatever.

Either way your biggest issue will be the amount of light available and you may need to play around a bit with your setttings to get the exposure right anyway. Take both lenses, but you will probably find the zoom more usefull as you may need to do quite a bit of legwork to get the angles you want when shooting with your 50mm. You might find that you just cant get the photos you want with the available light in which case you may have to embrace motion blur to get a good shot

 

[rickw262]

I think you are right about the apertures. I will just have to experiment. I think there should be a decent amount of ambient light coming from the shops and street lights. I'll just have to keep trying different things.

Thanks.

 

[bratkinson]

You mentioned using the 18-135 kit lens at f3.5. That's at the wide end, 18mm. It quickly moves to the f5.6 as you zoom to the longer focal lengths. I'm guessing that it won't be usable without a tripod and perhaps 1/30th or even slower, which would result in anything moving being blurred.

Therefore, your 50 f1.4 will be the lens you'll end up using just to get a decent exposure. I'd probably shoot in Av, setting the ISO to 1600 and shutter speed about 1/100th to start. If the camera picks f1.4, your depth of field (area in focus) will be quite thin. So I'd slow 'er down to 1/60th and hope for the best. Cranking the ISO beyond 1600 might be a little more noise than you'd like to corrrect.

 

[Patrice]

Sounds like you are a fairly new photographer yourself, how did you get yourself roped into 'leading' a photographic excursion into the downtown at night?

 

[ceejtank]

1/40 is not fast enough to freeze motion..... also - depends on lighting available.

 

[KmH]

1/40 is not fast enough to freeze motion..... also - depends on lighting available.

1/40 is fast enough to freeze some motion.

With a 50 mm lens on the camera, and using good camera holding technique, 1/40 may even be sufficient for controlling camera shake.

The rule of thumb for controlling minimal motion, like camera shake, is 1/the focal length of the lens.

 

[thetrue]

Doesn't the 60d have basically the same sensor as the t3i? In that case, you could shoot at iso6400 all night, have plenty of computer generated light and not a TON of noise.

 

[jwbryson1]

You have your hands full it seems. Based on what I'm reading, I'm thinking you need something like the 24-70mm f/2.8 lens and a tripod. A nighttime shot in a crowded market with moving people and tricky lighting---that's an advanced course and you are "leading" NooB's in this? Good luck.