Night Photography need help

[ubuntu83]

I want to know how to take photos at night. I have recently bought a DSLR and still struggling to understand different settings.What should have been done to take a good photo in this situation.






It was full moon too.

 

[ubuntu83]

BTW the equipment used was a Pentax K100D and 18-55mm standard Pentax DA kit lens.

 

[FlickerLight]

It depends on what you want to do with it. A tripod is almost always needed. If you want to take a picture of stationary objects, you could set up your camera to have along exposure. Keep you aperture wide open. This will keep allow more light into the camera. If taking a picture with differentlevels of light, spot metering is your friend.

A flash could also be beneficial, especially if you are taking pictures of subjects that tend to move. You have to be careful that the subject doesn't become washed out (which may take a diffuser of some sort), but with messing around with some apertures settings (for the flash exposure) and shutter speed (for everything else).

 

[AfroKen]

I would have used a tripod and taken the photo from a lower vantage point in addition to what FlickerLight suggested. Actually, he suggested the tripod...so okay, dropping to a lower vantage point. Taking photos of fires at night is somewhat challenging because it's quite high-contrast, so so use of lighting could benefit you as well.

 

[Andrew Boyd]

Of course if you use a flash it will ruin the mood and feel of the image, won't it?
You can rate your ISO up to 1000- 1600, use a slow shutter speed, and try shooting images more of people around the fire, not so much directly into the fire. Then the image brightness between the people and fire won't be so difficult.

 

[AfroKen]

Of course if you use a flash it will ruin the mood and feel of the image, won't it?

It could, depending on how you use the flash, which is why I suggested lighting instead. You could use off-camera lighting to light the shot how you want it to be and thus keep the mood. So we hope!

You can rate your ISO up to 1000- 1600, use a slow shutter speed, and try shooting images more of people around the fire, not so much directly into the fire. Then the image brightness between the people and fire won't be so difficult.

Yup.

 

[Derrel]

As AfroKen mentioned, fires at night cause inherently high-contrast situations--the fire is to use a technical term, a "jillion times brighter" than the night sky...so, what you need is a way to bridge the contrast gap,and the solution is FLASH!!!!

But, you need to gel the flash with an orange-ish gel in order to keep the flash's light output from looking too white. A 1/4 to 1/2 CTO orange-ish gel slipped onto the flash will allow you to use a small amount of flash on the people,and it will look "real", not faked. You cannot just blast the people with a full-power flash burst and not make it look a little bit faked, unless the fire is positively huge, like a bonfire. But,as long as the flash's output is warm and orange-y, you can get away with a lot, since the eye is good at spotting differences and incongruities,and orange light comes from....hot,glowing things like the sun at night, molten metal, hot filaments, and fire and coals...

When you use a gelled flash, you MUST take control of the white balance--many cameras default to FLASH white balance,so you need to make sure that an AUTO white balance does not mess things up. Setting the WB to a fixed pre-set is a good idea.