how do you shoot something like this at night ??

[dannylightning]

cant get it right, either way to dark or all blown out.. the first photo turned out cool with a heavy edit, the second photo will show you the issue i am having...

there is this clock tower i have tried to shoot a few times at night, its lit up very bright. but its the same thing either comes out washed out big time or its too dark to really see anything so i am wondering how you would set the camera for these types of shots.

 

[480sparky]

You've got such a wide dynamic range your camera isn't capable of recording both the deep, dark areas AND the brightly-lit spot-lighted areas at the same time as the second image shows.

Use a tripod, and shoot everything in manual. Take a shot, check the histogram. If it's too dark, raise the ISO, open the aperture more, and/or increase the shutter time. If it's too light, do the opposite.

 

[dannylightning]

i have my 1.8 lens set to 1.8 no need for a tripod as long as there is some light, got lots of great hand held night shots with that lens.

i took about 20 photos of that thing they were all either too bright or too dark. well if the camera cant do it at least i know what the problem is than.. thanks..

 

[480sparky]

The problem is your camera is dumb. Dee you emm bee.... dumb. As in a box of rocks. It has no clue what you're aiming it at. All the meter sees is light. It could be lots of light, it could be very little light. It just tells the camera what to do based on how much light it senses. It's working of a limited amount of pre-programmed responses. There's no way some engineer on the other side of the world could have predicted (5 years ago) that you're going to want to photograph Halloween decorations at night and be able to program such an eventuality into the camera.

You, on the other hand, are much smarter than a dumb meter. You can over-ride what the meter suggests by taking control. Shoot and check. If it's not what you want, change something and repeat.

 

[Light Guru]

Looks like a good subject for light painting.


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[The_Traveler]

i have my 1.8 lens set to 1.8 no need for a tripod as long as there is some light, got lots of great hand held night shots with that lens.

i took about 20 photos of that thing they were all either too bright or too dark. well if the camera cant do it at least i know what the problem is than.. thanks..

The problem is that you don't understand that you have enough light to get good pictures of the bright stuff but not nearly enough light to get good, detailed pictures of the dark stuff.
Read about high dynamic range and how one deals wiith it.

 

[dannylightning]

i never go by what the meter says when shooting at night. its never correct. i guess ill have to read about it and see what i can find out.

 

[KmH]

You have to spot meter several points in the scene.
Ony other metering mode is taking an average of to large a portion of the scene to be accurate.
Learn more about how your camera works if you want to use it at or beyond the extremes of it's capabilities.
However, if parts of the scene are really dark they may be dark enough to be beyond the capability of the meter in your camera. See your camera specifications.

The in-the-camera- light meter can only measure reflected light. Good hand held meters measure reflected light, incident light, and strobed light (flash)

Regardless, the camera is physically unable to record a scene with that much dynamic range without sufficient supplemental light being added to the dark portions of the scene - like by light painting.

One way to avoid that that is to make several exposures, each part of the scene exposed at an exposure value based on the results you got spot metering.
That series of exposures is then combined into a composite image that is then your final result.

 

[TCampbell]

If your subject isn't moving AND if your camera isn't moving... then you ALWAYS have enough light to get the shot.

Shoot in RAW format (JPEG compression will compress the data that seems similarly dark and make recovery of detail impossible).

Camera on tripod.

Shoot several bracketed images... about 2-3 stops apart each.

Bring them into Lightroom (or Photoshop), pick all your images, and tell it to "merge to HDR".

 

[Braineack]

do you only want the ghoul lit up with a black bg, or do you want the ghoul on the lightly exposed background as seen above?

 

[raventepes]

I'm just going to put this out there...

Personally, I like the look of the first picture. It works.

Photography isn't always about having a technically perfect picture. Sometimes, you want to have those imperfections that can give s sense of action, or in case of the ghoul, perhaps a sense of foreboding. Sometimes those accidents speak louder than if it were perfectly framed, or perfectly metered, or whatever. I love the image as is. It's great, it's solid...it has impact.

 

[The_Traveler]

 

[Derrel]

This would be a pretty good subject for a tripod-mounted shot done at f/5.6 or f/8, and the ghoul light painted a bit with a flashlight or very low-powered flash unit. But as was pointed out above by raventepes, the original, darkish image works very well!

The thing is, with a hand-held camera, a number of good technical routes are impaired quite a bit, because a hand-held camera tends to move quite a bit, and also, the photographer's hands are occupied with holding the camera; with the camera on a tripod and the shutter set to deliver something like a 30 second exposure with the lens at f/8, it's an easy thing to aim a flashlight, LED flashlight, or an electronic flash, and to then "paint" some light onto areas that you want to be brighter. The longer exposure range of from 15 seconds to 60 seconds gives you plenty of time to do smooth light painting.

 

[dannylightning]

It blows around in the breeze so long exposure would be a issue. I do like the image I got out of it, but I can't get anything good when trying to do that clock tower..

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[480sparky]

Shoot the clock tower before it gets totally dark out.