Best Night Shots

[davideglasgow]

I'll probably be in a position to take some cityscape shots tonight (with a tripod) with my Rebel XS. What types of settings should I be looking for besides ISO 100? Long shutter, but what about aperature? Maybe just shutter priority and let the camera worry about aperature? What about a focus point?

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

Shoot nightscape is just like shooting regular landscapes.

[davideglasgow]

Yeah, I should have specified that I'm a beginner and have never shot landscapes before. I can play with the shutter and aperature, but what about a focus point. I guess if the aperature is small enough, the focus point shouldn't matter as much, correct? If it helps, I'll probably be using my 50mm f/1.4 just for the lens quality. Only other choice is 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, but it's too soft.

[Jon Ruyle]

I haven't done a lot of night shooting, but I would suggest think that focal length is more important than the iq difference between these lenses. If your subject is a landscape at night, it will be difficult to control your framing other than changing focal length.

[Mark Elberson]

David,


A good starting point would be to set your camera to Av
(Aperture Priority) and set the f-stop to f/8. This will give you a
fairly deep DOF but is a large enough aperture that your IQ should not be degraded due to diffraction.
See what that gives you and go from there. If you tell me more about
what you are shooting and what you are trying to accomplish I could
probably give you some better advice :)

[Stephen Probert]

As always, it depends. Some of the best night city-scapes I have seen have been from the top of buildings. Or if you are high up in a building, put your camera close to a window, and turn the lights off in the room, that would work well too. For this kind of shooting, it doesn't really matter what you aperture is, or really where you focus since your closest subject will probably be far enough away that it will be in focus by default. For instance, on your XS at 18mm with an aperture of f/4, if you focus on something that is 100ft away, your depth of field (the distance that things are in focus) is infinite and nothing near to you will be out of focus as long as it is further than 12.3 ft away. And if you focus on the horizon with the same conditions, the near limit on your DOF is only 14 ft.


So you can see why aperture does not really matter so much. The reason to select a certain aperture is then to allow you to get more light, or better optical performance out of your lens.


Check out the depth of field calculator below to better understand how aperture and subject distance affect your FOF. Enjoy.


http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html ("http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html)

[George Slusher]

Do a Google search "night photography," though a lot of articles are
about setting exposure for film cameras. With your digital camera, you
can use the TTL metering and vary from there using exposure
compensation or manual exposure. I would use aperture priority rather than shutter priority. Shutter priority isn't all that useful.


If you're shooting at a fair
distance, the DOF will be pretty deep regardless of the aperture, as Stephen Probert said. One technique is to set the lens at the "hyperfocal" distance for the aperture you're using. That will put everything "in focus" from infinity down to 1/2 the hyperfocal distance. Use the link Stephen gave to find out the hyperfocal distance for your lens at various apertures. (For convenience, I put the Palm version of DOFMaster on my Palm TX so that I can figure things out in the field. He also has an iPhone/iPod touch version.)


You will need a good tripod, of course, and a good head that can be locked down solidly, as your exposures could be several seconds. A remote shutter release is a good idea, but you can also just set the self-timer and back away from the camera until the shutter is released. In some cases, it can be useful to use mirror lockup to further reduce vibrations.


If you can, shoot in RAW (or RAW + JPEG) so that you can twiddle with the white balance afterwards. ISO 100 may or may not be best, as the exposures can be very long.


If your nightscapes have artificial lights, you may be faced with the dilemma of letting the lights blow out to get other detail or settling for a dark image with bright spots. One way to mitigate that is to use "high dynamic range" or HDR. I just posted a message ("/forums/p/1046/7203.aspx#7203) about HDR in another thread, so I won't repeat myself here. However, here are some examples. The first was taken with a 30D + 17-85mm IS lens. (The EXIF data doesn't show that as it was processed with Canon Digital Photo Professional to adjust the white balance.) The others were taken with a 70-200mm f/4L. ISO 800 was used for all of them to avoid terribly long exposures. (The first was 3.2 sec as it was.)


/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.00.23.54/IMG_5F00_4635_5F00_dpp_5F00_600.jpg





The following is a sequence taken using automatic exposure bracketing. The exposure compensation was set at -2/3 (from experiment) and the bracketing was at 0, -2, and +2 stops, in order shown.


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Finally, here's an HDR rendition using those three shots.





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[Keith B]

I'm lazy, I set to av and set the f to 16 or even 22. I throw concern for diffraction out here most of the time. I prefer the tight sparkles of the lights rather than the smudgy looking flares.

[alexniedra]

Alright, you took the shots last night. Hope everything went well!


For future shoots, I would suggest removing any filters.Long exposures generally pick up any dust spots or smudges on the filter. Oh, and by the way, make sure you have a tripod. I have taken night
shots at 12mm at 1/30, but the results are somewhat dodgy. A good
tripod will give you flexibility to do whatever you need to do to get the shot. Set Av (Aperture Priority) and set your aperture to f/8-f/16. A narrow aperture will not only improve depth of field, but also give light sources a spectral look. ISO 100 is good like you mentioned. Try to focus with the centre point on a light source in the scene, and then recompose.

[kitaoka]

/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.00.27.68/night-2.jpg

[mpphoto12]

honestly the best picture iv seen in a while nice job! i was speachless when i saw this. i wish i had the gear to do this or to make this packed with emotion like you did thank you for posting this picture