First night shots - C&C please

[mosu84]

If you're at all curious, I can post up my Boston skyline pics, but I don't want to unecessarily hijack your thread.

Go for it; would love to see them. Do you take shots from Rowes Wharf? I see a lot of good pictures coming from that spot.

 

[manaheim]

No, I've never tried from Rowes Warf before. I'm not even totally sure where that is. I know roughly, but haven't bothered to sort it out completely.

Here's the one from the courthouse.

And here's my most recent shot from Memorial drive. Some people don't like it because the boat is fuzzy from movement, but I personally think the boat really adds something to the shot. <shrug>

 

[mosu84]

No, I've never tried from Rowes Warf before. I'm not even totally sure where that is. I know roughly, but haven't bothered to sort it out completely.

Here's the one from the courthouse.



And here's my most recent shot from Memorial drive. Some people don't like it because the boat is fuzzy from movement, but I personally think the boat really adds something to the shot. <shrug>

I like both, but really like the one from the courthouse. Do you use HDR at night? I was struggling to get the full dynamic range into one shot today when I was taking pictures.

I have this shot as well that I didn't post.

 

[manaheim]

Thanks. Nope, no HDR. Just a longish exposure on a smallish aperature. Shoot I gotta install Opanda Exif on this box... what were your settings? And what were your results without the HDR? Can you post those?

 

[mosu84]

Thanks. Nope, no HDR. Just a longish exposure on a smallish aperature. Shoot I gotta install Opanda Exif on this box... what were your settings? And what were your results without the HDR? Can you post those?

Yeah, here are a few shots pre-HDR. I should note, HDR wasn't planned at all; these were just me trying to get a good shot. When it failed, I just merged them for the hell of it.

Thanks for your help so far.

All were taken at ISO 200, F/5.6. The histogram was showing a lot of cutoff in these pictures (on either end)

This was an 1 second exposure

This was a 3 second exposure

This was a 2 second exposure

 

[manaheim]

It's a little hard to tell because these are a bit small. Could you do me a bit of a favor and take a 100% (not reduced) crop of a section of the buildings and post that... maybe the area around the prudential.

I -suspect- that you are just simply not exposing the image enough, but like I say, little tough to tell.

EDIT: I mean a crop of the ORIGINAL... not the HDR.

 

[mosu84]

It's a little hard to tell because these are a bit small. Could you do me a bit of a favor and take a 100% (not reduced) crop of a section of the buildings and post that... maybe the area around the prudential.

I -suspect- that you are just simply not exposing the image enough, but like I say, little tough to tell.

EDIT: I mean a crop of the ORIGINAL... not the HDR.

I put larger pictures in the previous post if you want to check that. I will work on getting you some crops if you still need them.

 

[mosu84]

It's a little hard to tell because these are a bit small. Could you do me a bit of a favor and take a 100% (not reduced) crop of a section of the buildings and post that... maybe the area around the prudential.

I -suspect- that you are just simply not exposing the image enough, but like I say, little tough to tell.

EDIT: I mean a crop of the ORIGINAL... not the HDR.

Here ya go:

 

[mosu84]

Well, now looking at the picture in Photoshop, I just realized that I'm an idiot, and that the 2-second exposure captured the full range.

 

[manaheim]

Ok, yeah...

So, night photography is really odd. The trick of it is you have to do things that won't necessarily make sense or look right to you when you are doing it, or even when you are in PP, but ultimately it works out much better.

The trick of it is to actually over-expose your shots by a bit. Basically, you want to see plenty of detail in the buildings, and your skies will look far from actually dark. The reason being that you want to make sure you have the detail elements in the shot. Then you darken the shot to bring down the sky a bit, but not so much as to lose the detail of the buildings... you want to see the edge of them!

If you go the other way, you wind up brightening up an image that doesn't actually have any detail in it, resulting in horrific noise and gross quality problems.

Now these shots you have here present a unique challenge in that you did not take them in actual darkness. To be honest, I have yet to try this so I'm not totally sure what the complexities would be... I suspect you're going to wind up with a much greater danger of overexposing the sky and losing detail in the clouds and whatnot, but I bet you could avoid that.

Generally I think people take the shots a bit earlier than it appears you have with these so that more of the ambient light from the sky brings out the details of the buildings... allows you to expose it a bit more quickly, gives good detail to the structures, but avoids overexposure issues and gives you a nice dark blue sky. Cool trick.

Note that when taking night shots you REALLY need to take them in RAW. This will allow you to overexpose by a couple of stops with really no issue or loss of data. Very important. Also allows you to adjust color balance as you have a lot of different light colors in there and you want to make sure the camera doesn't get confused and toss the wrong data out on you.

Also a tip... smaller aperatures give you the star effect on lights (you can see this in my shots). That also means longer exposures, and also will mean slightly less sharp images (smaller aperature tends to soften the image a hair). It's a tradeoff, but well worth it in my opinion. You have to find your lens sweet spot. I find my Sigma 10-20 does beautifully around f9-14.

 

[manaheim]

EDIT: Ignore the part about posts. I was reading wrong.

Don't ignore this: Looks like you may have missed your focus by just a tiny bit... manual focus is kind with night shots. On landscapes, manually focus to infinity. Be sure to check to make sure your lens is labeled properly for infinity. I usually test all my lenses and mark where true infinity is on the lens so I know for the future when I need it.

 

[mosu84]

EDIT: Ignore the part about posts. I was reading wrong.

Don't ignore this: Looks like you may have missed your focus by just a tiny bit... manual focus is kind with night shots. On landscapes, manually focus to infinity. Be sure to check to make sure your lens is labeled properly for infinity. I usually test all my lenses and mark where true infinity is on the lens so I know for the future when I need it.

Thanks for all the tips. I've never heard the part about exposing to infinity, and I'll check it out right away. I think you are right that I was kind of in between sunset and dark. I just missed the sunset by about 20-25 minutes, and I think that light would have been a lot more interesting.

 

[manaheim]

Thanks for all the tips. I've never heard the part about exposing to infinity, and I'll check it out right away. I think you are right that I was kind of in between sunset and dark. I just missed the sunset by about 20-25 minutes, and I think that light would have been a lot more interesting.

Good luck! I hope you post your next batch !

 

[Derek Zoolander]

i really REALLY hope I can get this good some day. I would love to try the same thing in NYC but I really am doubting my abilities at this moment. Im very jealous!

 

[manaheim]

i really REALLY hope I can get this good some day. I would love to try the same thing in NYC but I really am doubting my abilities at this moment. Im very jealous!

Best way to get better is to try it (likely repeatedly).

I've re-done that stupid skyline a good 3-4 times and I'm STILL not totally happy with it, but I think I've reached the point where I can't do it much better without either stitching, a WAY better lens (which isn't really available at that width), or with a larger format camera.

Each time I tried it I got better, but all my previous tries were awful.

I learned a ton each time though, and now I can pull off a night shot in pretty much one try.