Do people who shoot night photography...

Shutter

Shutter

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Kris
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Yes
use a graduated filter upside down to reduce city lights and polution?

Cheers

Kris
 
Depends on the effect your after, if your shooting at dusk and you want to tone down a bright skyline you could do it I suppose.
 
Cheers for the replies people!
I only really ask because of the amount of times I go out and find my shots are over exposed when trying to get star trails in when shooting over a city scape! Does that make sense?

Ta
 
Shutter said:
Cheers for the replies people!
I only really ask because of the amount of times I go out and find my shots are over exposed when trying to get star trails in when shooting over a city scape! Does that make sense?

Ta
Click to expand...

I'll be interested to find out as I'm due up to Valencia shortly with our local club to take some night shots :)
 
Shutter said:
Cheers for the replies people!
I only really ask because of the amount of times I go out and find my shots are over exposed when trying to get star trails in when shooting over a city scape! Does that make sense?

Ta
Click to expand...

That doesn't make much sense really. Star trail photography is typically done in remote dark areas to avoid any light pollution. You would require extremely dark grad to do this towards a city. In a city light pollution is a major problem shooting anything but few brightest stars. On the other, hand city photography is best while there is still some ambient light left.... Don't forget you can blend different exposures and frames to create the effect you require.
 
You probably want to avoid using filters at night if photographing light trails as you will almost certainly suffer from flare.
 
Shutter said:
use a graduated filter upside down to reduce city lights and polution?
Click to expand...

I tried it but too much flare as suggested - don't have a flare pic uploaded for easy reference but here's the potential result if you can avoid all light sources in frame.

This first one is straight from the cam + watermark. f/4, couple of minutes. Full dark- not twilight as the sky would suggest.


The failure (of the technique in general rather than the specific shot above) got me thinking about a different technique though and I now shoot urban star trails regularly without any concerns.

This is a stack of several consecutive jpgs with the final image converted to mono but otherwise unprocessed


So filters at night is possible but I found it very tough - even as a seasoned night shooter it's not only limiting compositionally but there's often not enough light around to get the filter set up by eye, so the couple of times I've tried it cost me twice as long manipulating the filter into position as I got to spend actually shooting.
 
Steep said:
There is a specialist filter you can buy that blocks out a lot of light pollution, designed for astrophotography - Astronomik CLS Light Pollution Filter, here's one that fits directly into the body of a Canon camera (not for use with EF-S lenses).
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Unless I'm reading it wrong these filters are pretty limited in application and mainly intended for deep space work rather than urban nights/ star trails
 
Thanks for everyones response on here, been some cool advice!
Andrew, are all your stacks done in 30sec exposures!?

Thaaaaaaaanks!
 
i have used a ND8 grad for night photography, but the right way up
works great for a full moon night, helps bring out a bit of foreground light before the moon over does it

4736253764_42c61c8584_z.jpg
 
AndWhyNot said:
Not sure I get this- is it just so you can work with longer exposure times?
Click to expand...

Yeah as I like to do light trails and where there's cars there's street lamps and the lamps are terrible for creating bright starry effects and it distracts the image.

This is one of my images that has the trouble I mention, It's not as bad on computer but when they are printed it sometimes comes out with a weird tinge and the colours are just horrible in the lights.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lukebrannon/5337274312/
 
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