Finally was able to goto Lantern festival. I took close to 200 shots out of which this is the only pic I feel came ok. This was my first time shooting in dark and lantern festival. I would like your feedback on how I could have done better. Shot with 35mm lens, spot metering, single point focus, manual. I plan to attend few more lantern festivals near by to improve my skills. I'm also looking for fast wide angle lens.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/156452684@N07/41194202545/in/pool-nikon35/
All I am writing is just guesswork, since I can't see the EXIF. My guesstimated starting point is: high ISO, overexposed channel(s), smallish? aperture? and heavy handed noise processing. If these presumptions are wrong, the all the rest of my post is wrong.
To get meaningful replies, please show the full EXIF.
That image looks like it is on the brink of overexposure. If you shot raw, then perhaps not. At least the web-jpg you are showing seems to have a blown red channel, maybe green too. It is also extremely blurry, perhaps because of the combination of low exposure, high ISO and strong noise reduction? Not much motion blur, though, so the shutter speed seems fine.
The dynamic range in that situation is very wide. You want to capture the features of the lanterns sharply while at the same time you also want the people visible. I'd start with a lower ISO to gain some dynamic range. If you use spot metering, then spot meter from a lantern, set exposure correction to something like +2.3EV or +2.7EV to avoid overexposure (the camera has about 3EV highlight latitude). Lock the exposure there, since all the lanterns are the same. Shoot raw, and finally open up the shadows in raw processing phase.
Or, if you like to shoot JPEG, set your camera's active D-Lighting to High, and the camera will open up the shadows for you. In this case you might be able to rise the exposure some more, since high ADL settings lower the exposure. I'd start at +3.3EV EC and shot a few test pictures and adjust from there.
The lanterns have a very warm color. You might want to cool the images a bit by experimenting with white balance, perhaps trying even "tungsten" setting and see what you like of them.
The DOF seems at least adequate, What aperture did you use? Is there room for wider aperture to get higher exposure and hence less noise?
Also try experimenting with the noise processing. Could you lower the strength? IMHO a noisy picture is better than a blurred one, but tastes differ. I never do any noise processing, but I believe I am in the minority. It's just that I have never seen a noise reduction method that doesn't destroy image details, so I prefer to skip the NR altogether and get the details instead. When I print, the noise isn't visible anyway.
