What is better for this night shot?

Ok, I do not have a city close by to shoot the weekly challenge this week. I thought I could try a little substitution, but it hasn't worked out. I have a power generating plant about 7 miles away (as the crow flies, but over 20 miles by road. It is lit up and stands out well on most nights. I have managed to take pictures of it in the day time and they come out fairly well for the 7 mile distance. Now for night time. I am using the 70-300mm at 300mm. I am on a tripod and using remote shutter control with a 2 second delay. I have tried different shutter speeds and f-stops @ ISO400 with less than satisfactory results.

Now for the question. It is a typical power plant with lots of lights. Would you use a closed down aperture (high f-stop) or wide open aperture to obtain the sharpest, not hazy lights? If I am not mistaken, a closed down aperture tends to give lights a flare, so assuming that I would think better results would be obtained from a wide open setting. Is that true? Along that same line of thinking a faster shutter speed could be used with the wide aperture setting which would help eliminate any camera movement.

Another thing that I noticed in my attempts was that while trying to focus with manual focus and in Live View zoomed in, the lights were difficult to get into focus (focus was very jumpy). Not sure if that would be normal in cold, night conditions. I guess it could be from slight camera shake and the light on the sensor for live view. I didn't try with the viewfinder as I wanted to use the Live View zoom feature. Maybe I should have. Ha!

All input/feedback/suggestions will be appreciated.

One problem you'll about always have at night is focus. You can not rely on auto-focus unless you have a very clear object to focus upon. For infinity I use the moon if it is there. For all the rest the only good option is using live-view and zooming in and manually adjusting focus. The light available will define the quality of the image on your LCD. When there's enough light, it's reasonable easy to adjust focus but when light is low, the image is grainy and doesn't respond to changes very fast. You can manually focus on a light-source itself until it looks crisp. It might take some tries and some cursing. At the distance you're shooting, it is normal that each time you touch the focus ring, the image will jump a bit. You need to drill the cam to a block of concrete to not suffer that.

I have no idea how well lit the power plant is but I typically use long exposure for all my night shots. That's not possible without a tripod. You can set to aperture mode, matrix metering and let it pick the shutter. I always try to shoot at 100 ISO.

If the image turns out to be too dark, you can open up the lens wider or use exposure compensation and let it overexpose. Once you have some idea what settings, easiest is manual. The hard part is trying to get as much light as possible without blowing out the highlights. That takes some trial and error or experience. I can check my histogram before the shot which simplifies it but if you can't, check it after the shot and adjust accordingly.

Without a tripod you can try to gain more shutter by upping the ISO but it'll become harder to control the clipping.

Even when you captured the light well, it can still look too dark in cam but that can be adjusted in post. With long exposure noise reduction on, at 100 ISO there's little noise to worry about.

With the D3300 I typically started with 30 seconds, 100 ISO, wide open. Depending upon the result, I adjust accordingly.

Excuses: It was cold! The dog's teeth were chattering too. (That's not a lie. Ha!) I got set up only to find that I did not have an SD card in the camera. Tear things down. Back to the house to get one. Set up again. Took a series of photos and wasn't happy with them. Started to pack it in and realized that I had a CPL filter on the lens. Removed the filter and set things up again. About three more shots and did I say, It was cold! Still not satisfied, but it was enough for me for the night. Ha!

The guess from what you said [MENTION=31330]J-see[/MENTION] is that one, I did not realize the problems of slow reaction when focusing in Live View. I'm sure that was a big part of the fuzzy to clear to fuzzy jumping as I tried to focus manually. Second, I did not go to wide open on the aperture. I think the widest I went was F11 if I remember correctly. Max shutter speed I used was 15 seconds and Max aperture of F40. Slowest shutter was 1 second various aperture settings. I am thinking that I need to use the widest aperture and play with shutter speeds up to 30 seconds or so. Also, try to focus precisely. Ha!

I typically like to close down the aperture and ISO and go for longer exposure to capture more sharpness and detail, but you'll get "light auras" from the aperture blades, like you mentioned. Longer exposures allow for more of the ambient "glow" to be captured, though. (see the pic below from quite a while back)



You'll need a VERY stable tripod, or very stable conditions, with the VR off, and a remote trigger (or shooting in timer mode if you don't have the remote) so that you don't get any shake from activating the shutter. If you have a way to hang your equipment bag underneath the tripod to add a bit of stabilization, I'd recommend it. Dial up in manual and shoot with several different settings/exposures to get what you're after. Lower ISO allows for more time, and the closed down aperture allows for more give on the focus.

It's really a trial and error thing, from my experience, until you find what works, then you can go off of those settings going forward. I *LOVE* long exposure shots when I can get them, and tend to prefer the light rays from the aperture blades, but I'm sure you'll find a mix you like!

Oh... DRESS WARM! LOL

I hear you about cold. Long exposure shots isn't exactly the sort of action photography that makes us sweat. I tried taking my dogs a couple of nights ago but all they did was get between my legs and giving me sad "What are we doing here, fool?" looks.

You best open up the lens. At f/11 light has to stand in line , at f/40 photons need to be anorexic to make it through. If your subject is at 7 miles, DoF shouldn't be a problem but sharpness could be depending what lens you use.

It's a bit of a search to find the right settings and much depends on what you can pull out of the shot afterwards in post. But once you find the good settings for the cam/lens combo, all it takes are minor adjustments.

Thanks Pretzel and J-see for your responses. I think I had the basics, but not the particulars. Ha! My original idea was to get the Power plant lights with the starburst effect on the lights. That was why I started with a long exposure and high f-stop settings. Then I started playing around as I stated. After reviewing my photos, I think the lights were too far away and too close together to get the starburst effect I originally wanted. I'm still new to low light (actually new to all) ha! More playing is in the future. I think ideally it would be advantageous to get closer to the plant to accomplish my desired effect.

As others mentioned, a stable tripod, VR off, mirror up and remote release are essential. On a related matter, I could suggest shooting when the sky is not entirely black, but dark blue. This is my personal preference: black sky is just too empty for me.

As Pretzel explained, starburst effect becomes visible at small apertures. Distance to the lights doesn't matter, as long as they are bright enough. They are (almost) at infinity.

Here is an example of a shot taken at f/5.6 (100% crop):


And the same at f/16.


Note slight loss of quality due to diffraction at f/16. This particular lens (Sigma 17-50 f/2.8) has a "sweet spot" at about f/5.6, so the top image is near optimal. Very small apertures will always result in loss of sharpness.

The tripod shouldn't wobble but shake is not that much of a problem when doing long exposure. I just press and that's it. Any movement caused by the shutter or press will be invisible.

Here's a 30 sec shot where I just walked through the scene going into the distance and coming back while flicking my lighter to see what the result would be. The light wasn't bright enough but the more important part was to check how much I'd show up in the shot. I've been walking in the FoV for about 25 of those 30 seconds.



To add: evidently trigger shake could be a problem when shooting longer lenses but it has to shake long and hard to show up in 30s exposures.

Tried again tonight, but a little earlier so I could work on the focus. Played with different combinations and this is probably the best of the bunch. Still not great, but better than last night.

You have to keep in mind that while you want to take a night shot, the cam does not know what night is and will always do its best to make it look like a day shot by suggesting, or when in auto modes, adjusting towards that direction. It'll always try to push the middle tones towards a certain "brightness". If you want a good idea what the camera tries to accomplish, put it in full auto for one of the night shots and you'll see the difference between what it has in mind and what you want it to be.

It's a battle of wills.

cwgrizz said:

Now for the question. It is a typical power plant with lots of lights. Would you use a closed down aperture (high f-stop) or wide open aperture to obtain the sharpest, not hazy lights? If I am not mistaken, a closed down aperture tends to give lights a flare, so assuming that I would think better results would be obtained from a wide open setting. Is that true? Along that same line of thinking a faster shutter speed could be used with the wide aperture setting which would help eliminate any camera movement.

Another thing that I noticed in my attempts was that while trying to focus with manual focus and in Live View zoomed in, the lights were difficult to get into focus (focus was very jumpy). Not sure if that would be normal in cold, night conditions. I guess it could be from slight camera shake and the light on the sensor for live view. I didn't try with the viewfinder as I wanted to use the Live View zoom feature. Maybe I should have. Ha!

All input/feedback/suggestions will be appreciated.

Click to expand...

Ah, good questions. I suggest that you try both methods and determine which one works best for your particular situation. Digital is free after all and it doesn't take too long to find out the results. And, since that plant is not going to go away, you'll have all the time to experiment. Nothing like hands on experience to learn.

Also, that far away you might as well focus to infinity, but rule of thumb is to use the distance scale at least roughly for anything that might fit into it.