First time night shot, need suggestions

First time doing a night shot. just got my camera yesterday, this is from a road pointing towards the highway where two mountains were, there was no moon.

The mountains are being lit up mainly by the headlights I believe

I was going to climb a mountain to get a shot of the whole city, but I would of gotten phenomena, so I took the shot from my car with the door open with the heater blasting

changed the white balance and added one stop higher exposure in Camera RAW since I can only do 30 sec exposure until my remote comes in


I forgot to turn on the long exposure noise reduction feature, that might of helped, Ill try again tonight

It was F/6.3 ISO800 and 30 sec

The original was very very orange, but changing the white balance from auto to tungsten and that fixed it

Very nice for just getting the camera.. I have yet to try an extended exposure.. I think you picked a nice place for yours.

Pat in NH

Nice shot!

Very nice!

Hey, works for me.

Reading your post I was expecting to see a crazy looking photo... but I'm very impressed. Nice shot, well done!

I found myself loving it, and also lamenting that all those headlight were crossing the view. But I suppose you would have the nice lighting on the mesas otherwise. I guess you can't have everything - but at least you have a fine image!!

Took a bunch more tonight, here is one that came out great, and a few sunset ones

Man, if that last one was 3200x900, it would make a great wallpaper.

I have it that big, that one was when the sun first went down, I had to use a ND filter to get the long light streaks since the sky was still kinda bright, without it. it was just creating short streaks that looked odd

here is the last one before I go to bed

We are about 100 miles away from Las Vegas, but you can see the glow from it behind the mountains, and the beam from the Luxor

This one is 10sec at ISO 800 and f/5.6

Here is another try from the same area as the first one I posted, and after a few more weeks of knowledge. The moon helped light the sky on this one though, in the first post there was no moon.



I did a 4 min exposure after this one and got some little star trails and found the star they rotate around which is exciting, maybe this weekend ill do a super long one and try to get some circles.

For star trails people generally take short exposures and "stack" the images to form a single image. For long exposures your CCD will begin to exhibit noise.

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Ah ok, but do you think the long exposure noise removal feature of my camera would fix that, if I did a 30 min exposure, it would do another 30 min exposure with the shutter closed and remove the noise that is sees from the first shot.

I wouldn't mind it taking an hour if it means not having to create the image I want using multiple pictures, Id rather make it look like that from one shot if its possible.

These pictures look pretty good! However I do have a couple of suggestions:

First off, there is a lot of light pollution in these photos. Cars, sun glow on the horizon , possibly moon light pollution, and cities. All of these things take away from the vibrance of the stars. Make sure you wait an hour or two after sunset for the best photos, and try to avoid cars and city lights. But if you are influentially incorporating them then they are not an issue, vibrant stars just wont really be there.

Also you apertures are really small. Open that baby up to let as much light in as possible! You can lower your iso an exposure times by doing this. There are almost no cons of having the aperture opened up to 3.5 or 2.8 or even 1.8

-Wahugg

very nice work gaffney ,the first was my fav. looks perfect to me

Great shot!