Prague Castle and the St. Charles Bridge at night

[mwdoher]

I didn't have a tripod on me. It was considerably darker than this shows, and as you can tell by the softened water, the shutter was open for a significant amount of time. This image is unedited. What could I have done to make this shot a better one?

 

[GeorgieGirl]

You really needed a tripod or at least a stable surface to keep things sharp. Depending upon where you were shooting from, set on a railing or a rock or even the camera on the ground with some sort of tilt upward wedge to capture your subject if needed. Long exposures will turn out this way without a method to stablilize the camera. Step two would be to set your camera to timer so you dont shake the camera even that little bit when you depress the shutter if without a shutter cable.

Looks like quite a sight!:thumbup:

 

[mwdoher]

GeorgieGirl, thanks for the feedback. I did, in fact, use a railing and the timer. I have a few more shots that were shorter exposures, but they seem to lack symmetry or balance. Thanks again!

 

[LizardKing]

Besides the movement (for which you need to use a tripod and the timer function), it also seems to be a little overexposed. There's no detail in the buildings, they're like burned-out.
To avoid this, sometimes I use to take 1/3-2/3 steps underexposed. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't...

Here you have a similar picture I took last year... With the camera on a tripod and 1/3 step underexposed (if I remember correctly)...

Prague Castle | Flickr

Regards,
LizardKing

 

[mwdoher]

That shot is incredible. Yours is much darker - and it's a lot more like the color of the sky when I was taking my photo. I really did have it on a railing, but the shutter was open for a number of seconds. Unfortunately, I didn't know about RAW at the time; I didn't read about that in the manual until the train ride to Frankfurt!

 

[LizardKing]

Yes, it's incredibly dark over there at night... I was surprised by that, too.
The ability to shoot in RAW gives you so much control over the picture, but this one was taken in JPEG directly. I believe the difference between the pictures is just the 1/3-2/3 steps down in the exposure. And I do see some movement, and that probably helped too.

When taking these kind of shots, I always take a couple of extra exposures below and under what the camera shows as a perfect exposure. Just in case I need them.

Regards,
LizardKing