night time photography

71bay

71bay

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Name
martin
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Hi I have just come back from my holls, used my nikon d40 all the daylight shots came out well but the night time shots arn`t great,
they are either too dark or to "white looking".
I tried various settings on the camera when taking the photos but could not get a good night time picture.
Its the standard 55 kit with the in built flash
any ideas thanks
 
EdinburghGary said:
Lots of ideas, lets see the examples first.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. Therte are many many ways of getting night time photos wrong and fewer ways of getting them right.
 
this is the type of result

160.jpg
 
A little character is lost with the use of the in-built flash. Did you use a tripod and get some long exposures?
 
Hi were you using a tripod, if so you could have done away with flash, used a smaller apature, F11-F16, this would give better depth of feild. you would just need to experiment with the shutter speed to get the right exposure.
 
Hi guys, no tripod used,
guess I should have played around with the settings more, but im new to dslr and not sure about all the adjustments you can use:'(
 
yes tripod would have helped .

also i would resize your pic to 800 on the longest side as the pixel police will be along soon :nuts:


md:thumbs:
 
as an image i quite like it and for handheld nighttime its really quite good - obvious flaws are the lack of sharpness/focus and the overly bright white neon light - but think you've done quite well to get what you have out of it.... as others have said a tripod mount shot would have been much better
 
tp1_filtered1.jpg

Hi 71bay,
I hope you don’t mind but I had a quick play with your ‘photo. Let me know if that’s a problem and I’ll remove straight away.
I’m sure there are better people here for this kind of thing but here what I did in a rough and ready kind of way.

Straighten it a bit in Photoshop Elements (Select>all. Image>Transform>Perspective)

Changed the levels in Photoshop Elements, (Enhance>Brightness/Contrast>Levels. Eye drop the bright one on the brightest part and the dark one, you know where). There are more sophisticated ways of using this tool but it’s a good start.

Sharpened it with Photoshop Elements to try and reduce the camera shake (Having selected all, Filter>Unsharp mask then play with the settings)

Reduced noise with Neat Image, this makes the image much smoother especially in low light shots where electronic noise is an issue. You can download a free demo version (only saves as a jpeg) from their website.

Having done all that the big problem here is camera shake as has been noted by others. A tripod would remove this, a monopod would make a big difference as an alternative. There is a software package called Focus Magic which helps with camera shake but I’ve no experience with it, I belive it’s $45 on download. If it’s a prized family holiday ‘photo it might be worth a go (do let us know what it’s like if you go for it).

I would also suggest holding the camera parallel with at least one plane of the subject to improve the perspective. That is to say if you stand in front of a building and the “film” plane in is parallel to the building the horizontal and vertical lines will look normal. If you tilt the camera up the horizontal lines say parallel to each other but the vertical lines start to converge, like wise camera vertically flat but panned left or right the verticals will be parallel and the horizontals will merge. If the camera isn’t parallel in either plane the buildings, street furniture etc all go wonky as in your example.

I hope this is of some interest or use to you.
 
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