Night Shoot

With my wife being away for the evening I decided to get my kit together and go for a walk to take some night time shots.  I have recently been shown that a long exposure with a small aperture can get some quite good results with the images being sharply in focus. 

There are a number of things though to look out for.  When taking a night shot the exposure, as usual, depends upon the amount of light you have available and the technical restrictions of your camera.  In my case my camera will only keep the shutter open for up to 30 seconds before switching to bulb, this means that if there is not enough light around for a 30 second exposure then I need a shutter release that can hold the shutter open for as long as I need to, you do not want to be pressing the button for that length of time.

On my expedition I took the following bits of kit: a tripod, the standard 17-70mm lens, grey card, light meter, spare batteries, flash gun, remote shutter release and remote for the off camera flash.  I did not use all of this kit, I took it to keep my options open.  I did have in mind a location but in the event I was a bit disappointed with the results.  Technically it was fine but artistically it did nothing for me.  Most of the evening was a leg stretching exercise and also noting other future locations for possible shoots.

So at the first location, the one I had wanted to shoot, I walked across a road bridge to get a view of the church in town, this was only a partial view and at first I wanted to get the line of the road with the church in the background.  The problems I found with this were the number of streetlamps which would cast too much light on the scene and effectively overpower the main subject, which for me was the church.  I decided to remove the distraction of the lights and re-frame just the church with the houses in the foreground.

The next thing I did was to assess the light using the ambient light reading from my meter.  At first when I took a reading (under the street lamps) the machine gave me an error.  I then adjusted the time until the error corrected itself.  I had already set the ISO to 3200 (in order to allow a higher sensitivity to light).  I adjusted the time to 1/15 sec which gave me an FStop of 4.5.

With the settings above the next task was to get the white balance sorted out, the streetlamps cast a rather ugly orange glow.  In my case I took the picture using the grey card and settings above then switched the camera to custom white balance and used the image to calibrate the sensor.  When doing this I always focus on the centre of the grey card making sure that the circle in the viewfinder is over the card.

Now the next thing was to re-adjust the settings on the camera as I did not wish to shoot at ISO 3200.  So first of all I reduced the ISO to 200 and in doing so the FStop automatically compensates.  It is not enough to let the FStop compensate as in all likelihood there will not be enough range in the lens to cope with the very large aperture required or it will be off the scale (not technically possible).  So in tandem with knocking the ISO down I also decreased the shutter speed and continued to do this until I could shoot at F22 (I wanted depth of field).  the final settings after adjustments was F22 at 25 seconds and ISO 200.  I then mounted the camera onto the tripod.

To summarise the camera was tripod mounted, the white balance had been set using  grey card, the FStop was set at 22, which is a small aperture for maximising the amount of the picture in focus (depth of field).  The ISO could have been raised to 400 if required (ie not enough light about) and in my case I had a further 5 seconds to spare if I wanted to hold the shutter open for longer without using the bulb feature (again to let more light in).

Problems: The sources of bright light could become over-exposed in the image, moving traffic and people will cause further distraction by leaving a trace on the image, glare from sources of light may leak onto the sensor, so a lens hood or some improvised screen to stop the glare is handy.  The tripod needs to be steady and left alone during the 25 seconds otherwise you will get camera shake.  You may also have to focus in manual if the camera has difficulty in auto focus due to the lack of light.

Once you have your base settings and are content it then becomes a case of experimenting with adjusting the time that the shutter is open.  You can do the above without a light meter but you just have to 'guess' with the settings a bit more before you zero in on your preferred settings. F16 @ 15 seconds and ISO 400 is a good start.  The camera by the way was in Manual.

The image above shows the 'natural' light cast by the street lamps as I calibrate for daylight to get rid of the orange glow.

This image is a test shot and there is some camera shake as I was taking it at 1/15 sec.  You can see the huge difference between this and the previous image.  It really depends upon what you want to capture but in this case I prefer the nice blue sky and cleaner light than the orange glow.  As it happens you can see the overpowering effect of the streetlights (I think this is a little too bright) and you can see that when a long exposure is used you end up with sources of light making stars (this is to do with the construction of the lens.  I did not have a lens hood on but I am not sure how effective it would have been in reducing the glare.

The image above is the one I wanted to capture, although I elected to remove the road as the streetlamps would have been too bright.  You can see the lights on the building to the right, these were burning out on the image and so, depending upon what you want to do you can shorten the exposure which will darken the image and produce a more prominent effect from the lights.  The impact of the lights in this case is not great.  If I wanted to use this image I would edit the very small section of the barrier on the left hand bottom corner.

On my wanderings I also took a couple more but I was not inspired.

In this image I had to avoid a large green bin on the left hand side of the image and a very bright light on the right hand side of the image.  that said there are still a number of lights burning out, such as the bank on the right and indeed the pharmacy just to the right of the stage.  I could have taken a picture using a faster shutter speed but I did not see any merit in the image.  The thing that drew me initially was the rubbish on the ground and the lights on the building behind.  There was quite a few people around as well, in some cases moving across the image.