Night Shots - Blown out lights?

Longimanus

Longimanus

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Hi

I took a few night shots whilst on holiday in December and had a question about blown lights?

Is it normal to expect to blow lights when taking night shots or should I have been reducing the shutter speed?

Photo below (15secs, f11, Iso 100)

 
The lights are a light sorce and are usually much brighter than their surroundings. One way of dealing with the subject is shoot it whilst there is still some daylight left. Sorry if this is not well explaned. But I expect someone will be able to explaine it better.
 
I won't make a better job of explaining but I'll put it in a different way :)

Such night shots have a big range of light and dark - you're not going to get an 'exposure' for the whole scene. So (unless you start playing with multiple exposures) you're going to have to decide where in the shot you want what amount of exposure - and forsake other parts of the shot. If there is a bit of daylight left, then the dark bits aren't so dark and so you have less of a big range to deal with - you could even use filters to shade the bright lights to reduce the range even more.

Ultimately though, you will need to decide the effect/end result that you want, how illuminated you want the picture to be and you will need to decide if the blown highlights/black areas are acceptable. Don't expect the impossible.

Edit: I like your night shot and would not be worried about the lights. Did you try taking other shots with reduced/increased exposure (I'm thinking specifically shutter speed)? It would be interesting to see a shot slightly less exposed and to know which you prefer.
 
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If you want to have an entire night time scene the only way to really get that is exposure bracketing, and then merging the different exposures into a single image, or you can stight a happy balance between the blown highlights and the rest of the scene :thumbs:
 
Cheers for all the comments, I was just thinking that I had done something slightly wrong with the shutter speeds, some good advice also given, next time I will take all these into account

I did try some other speeds, I will try and dig them out

Just for the record, I do quite like the shot, was just wondering about the blown bits
 
Exposure bracketing will do it - but personally unless you're desperate for that extra detail, I've never found it to detract from a shot - it certainly doesn't bother me in the one you've posted!

Cheers,
James
 
[kirk]Nice shot![/kirk]

To me, the lights don't actually look completely blown - very bright highlights, yes but there seems to be a bit of colour in them still.

IMO, the shot works well as shot. Some light in the sky would make it different but I'm not 100% convinced it would improve it! If a reshoot is possible, have a play a bit earlier in the evening.
 
One of the best lessons I ever learnt about night shots, was to not take them at night...

Try and get them whilst there's still some light in the sky, the hour just after the sun has set. You'll get lovely, rich blue skies as opposed to black and it helps to balance out the exposure some.
 
Again thanks for all the comments, I have taken all of it onboard and will put it into practise when I get the chance again.
 
Some good points mentioned about balancing the light by shooting at sunset..

Tbh I think your image looks fine - only some of the lights look blown but they're only small and don't detract from the image. There would be no detail in the lights anyway so the fact that they're blown doesn't really matter.

IMO you only want to worry when you've lost detail because larger areas are blown.
 
Longimanus said:
Hi

I took a few night shots whilst on holiday in December and had a question about blown lights?

Is it normal to expect to blow lights when taking night shots or should I have been reducing the shutter speed?

Photo below (15secs, f11, Iso 100)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/1975longimanus/8376575536/
Click to expand...

Yes it's normal. You have extreme darks with lights something has to give.
 
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