I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
very cool nightshot! i'm curious... how do you decide on f stop and exposure? what made you decide on 2 seconds at f/8 here vs. f/11 and 20 seconds used for the shot a couple days ago?
My typical 'go-to' settings for blue hour photography are ISO 200 and f/8-f/11 -- this is the 'sweet spot', sharpness-wise, of my relatively cheap lenses. I use ISO 200 as this is the lowest available when Highlight Tone Priority is enabled, a Canon setting that makes it slightly harder to unintentionally overexpose the image, at the cost of slightly increased noise over ISO 100.
I then adjust the shutter speed so that I 'expose to the right' -- i.e. I try and expose the picture just to the point before significant parts are overexposed. This gives the most data to work with when processing.
Typically this gives me shutter speeds of somewhere between 8 and 30 seconds, depending on what I'm photographing and just how dark it is. For the majority of my shots, that works well -- for the example on the 4th September, 20 seconds was long enough to smooth out the ripples in the water nicely, as well as preventing a few annoying pedestrians from appearing on the path. Sometimes if it's really dark I'll enable bulb mode and manually do a 45, 60 or even 120 second exposure.
However, this photo differed from most in that I was trying to capture motion and pick up the light trails from the traffic. When the road is relatively dark (such as for my shot of the bridge the other day), generally this doesn't require any change from my normal settings, but in this case, the roadway here is brightly lit. The result was that, when I dialed in ISO 200 and f/11 (giving me an 8 second exposure), the fixed illumination of the road overpowered the moving illumination of the taillights.
To understand this fully, you need to think of how the camera captures the image. The tail lights are moving across the image, and therefore the light from them is moving across the sensor. This means that each 'pixel' on the sensor is only capturing a very small amount of light from the taillights, as they sweep across relatively quickly. However, those same pixels are being continuously flooded by the street lights, causing the majority of light to be captured from the streetlights rather than from the taillights.
In order to fix that, we need to make the taillights have more of an impact on our picture. There are two ways we can do that. Firstly, we could slow the traffic down, so that the light passes across the sensor more slowly, and more of it is captured. I considered this option, but standing in the middle of three lanes of traffic didn't seem like a particularly good idea, even by my standards! The other option is to increase the sensitivity of the camera. By capturing light more quickly, the street lights, which are fixed, contribute the same amount to the photo, but the tail lights, which are moving, contribute more -- the sensor is able to collect more light from them, even though they are travelling at the same speed. In order to do this, I opened my aperture to my minimum 'acceptable' value for my lens, f/8, and increased the sensitivity of the camera by bumping it up to ISO 400.
The tradeoff of doing this is that, while the trails are brighter, they are also shorter -- unfortunately, without either slowing the traffic down, or altering the intensity of either the taillights or the street lights, we can't do much to alter that in camera.
Let me know if that doesn't make sense -- it's quite a complex tradeoff!
yeow! ok - i have a lot to learn about night shoots... tx so much for the info... printing it out for future reference for the next time i give it a go!
incidentally, i'd never heard of highlight tone priority but just googled it and i think i understand it... (also just learned that there is a feature to reduce noise when shooting at high iso which i wish i'd known about before setting out to shoot this evening)...
love the grand realism here and fantastic motion. . .your explanation is great. . .I just have to be sure to save it somewhere so I can reread it until it sinks in! Too bad. . .have to FAV so I can find it again! ;->
My typical 'go-to' settings for blue hour photography are ISO 200 and f/8-f/11 -- this is the 'sweet spot', sharpness-wise, of my relatively cheap lenses. I use ISO 200 as this is the lowest available when Highlight Tone Priority is enabled, a Canon setting that makes it slightly harder to unintentionally overexpose the image, at the cost of slightly increased noise over ISO 100.
I then adjust the shutter speed so that I 'expose to the right' -- i.e. I try and expose the picture just to the point before significant parts are overexposed. This gives the most data to work with when processing.
Typically this gives me shutter speeds of somewhere between 8 and 30 seconds, depending on what I'm photographing and just how dark it is. For the majority of my shots, that works well -- for the example on the 4th September, 20 seconds was long enough to smooth out the ripples in the water nicely, as well as preventing a few annoying pedestrians from appearing on the path. Sometimes if it's really dark I'll enable bulb mode and manually do a 45, 60 or even 120 second exposure.
However, this photo differed from most in that I was trying to capture motion and pick up the light trails from the traffic. When the road is relatively dark (such as for my shot of the bridge the other day), generally this doesn't require any change from my normal settings, but in this case, the roadway here is brightly lit. The result was that, when I dialed in ISO 200 and f/11 (giving me an 8 second exposure), the fixed illumination of the road overpowered the moving illumination of the taillights.
To understand this fully, you need to think of how the camera captures the image. The tail lights are moving across the image, and therefore the light from them is moving across the sensor. This means that each 'pixel' on the sensor is only capturing a very small amount of light from the taillights, as they sweep across relatively quickly. However, those same pixels are being continuously flooded by the street lights, causing the majority of light to be captured from the streetlights rather than from the taillights.
In order to fix that, we need to make the taillights have more of an impact on our picture. There are two ways we can do that. Firstly, we could slow the traffic down, so that the light passes across the sensor more slowly, and more of it is captured. I considered this option, but standing in the middle of three lanes of traffic didn't seem like a particularly good idea, even by my standards! The other option is to increase the sensitivity of the camera. By capturing light more quickly, the street lights, which are fixed, contribute the same amount to the photo, but the tail lights, which are moving, contribute more -- the sensor is able to collect more light from them, even though they are travelling at the same speed. In order to do this, I opened my aperture to my minimum 'acceptable' value for my lens, f/8, and increased the sensitivity of the camera by bumping it up to ISO 400.
The tradeoff of doing this is that, while the trails are brighter, they are also shorter -- unfortunately, without either slowing the traffic down, or altering the intensity of either the taillights or the street lights, we can't do much to alter that in camera.
Let me know if that doesn't make sense -- it's quite a complex tradeoff!
incidentally, i'd never heard of highlight tone priority but just googled it and i think i understand it... (also just learned that there is a feature to reduce noise when shooting at high iso which i wish i'd known about before setting out to shoot this evening)...