I took this photo last night, and not too happy with it. colours dont seem too vivid, not terribly sharp, and the bright neon lights (white ones) seem an unavoidable problem, the longer i keep the shutter open to improve the light in one area of the photo, the more overexposed those neon lights get. also need some help with perspective cropping to straighten out that building on left hand side. found a site that explains perspective cropping but didnt quite understand how they managed to straighten out what they did, their instructions were vague. on the right, that's a very bright streetlight, but looks more like a blazing sun.
i'm off to hong kong soon to take photos of the tsing ma bridge which should make some nice photos, but unless i can get some help with night photography with the D70, i wont be using this camera i'm afraid.
for comparison i'll upload shortly a similar photo taken last night with my Fuji S7000, which i prefer for night photography. there are many better night photos of cityscapes on this site, and i would like to get mine to look just as nice.
Exposure: 1/3s f5.0, some saturation and brightness/contrast in PS, unsharp mask and cloned out some junk. levels seemed ok. metering: 3D colour matrix.
Well, straight off I'd say go for something like F22 and 10-15 seconds. I've been experimenting with night shots with the D70 myself recently and have found these settings produce some good results. They don't totally eliminate the problem of bright spots, but various suggestions have been made to me to overcome these, including combining two shots using different settings - sounds like an extreme solution to me and I haven't tried it, but plan on giving it a go.
I use the perspective adjustment tool in Paintshop Pro 9 and find this usually does the job.
I see what you mean about the comparison with the Fuji shot - although you quote 1/1.3 there rather than 1/3, and yet get longer headlight trails. Is this right? Surely should be the other way round...
First, I like the sun effect on the right and would not try to get rid of it.
Next, I agree with Hugo when he says that using a smaller aperature (bigger number) will help. The same goes for adjusting your ISO as small as possible.
If you can add filters, add a polarizer. You might also consider adding a medium density graduated filter, turning it so it's darkest region is at the lower-left corner. This will limit the light from the brightest region and bring out the colors of the sky more easily.
hi lisa. you're right, there are some pretty bright sources of light in that photo and they can overpower the rest of the image i think. as i noted to hugo and james, i didnt adjust my aperture settings at all last night, only the shutter. so thats probably a big reason for some problems.
as for the bridge, there (hopefully) arent any lighting problems there, and i do look forward to a successful time shooting photos there. you can see a decent photo of the bridge here:
hi james. as i indicated to hugo, i neglected aperture totally last night and was concentrating too much on shutter speed without necessary adjustments to aperture (had the camera on manual). will give it a go again with smaller apertures to see what the results are. will also consider shooting in RAW. incidentally, ISO for my photo was 200.
hi hugo. i had the camera on manual and was focusing too much on shutter speed and totally neglected the aperture values. that's probably a big part of the problem.
as for metering, I used matrix metering which is supposed to take information from various areas of the frame. i thought this might be more useful since there are a variety of light sources throughout the photo. but i could experiment with other metering values.
hi timothy. that photo was shot at ISO200. will also start shooting in RAW and experimenting more as well. its the best way to learn, just thru trial and error. thanks for the help.
hi burak. thanks for the help. repositioning the camera is an option. i'll do that next time i visit that area, just for the practice. i will also attempt to bracket the photos next time as well.
It seeems like this image has a lot to deal with as far as lighting goes. First I'm totally surprised how the one street light looks like a blazing sun, never seen that before in an image. I think the rest of the exposure is perfect. The only thing that is creating a lot of light is the sign marque and what appears to be a brigthly lit billboard on the right. I think I would go with an f22 aperture setting. I've seen photos taken at and f22 and it appears to give some of the lights a star filter effect. I think once you take photos of the bridge with your camera the photos will look great. I don't know what surrounds the bridge, but I don't think you will have so many lighting situations to deal with all at the same time. Good luck. And nice job on this one!
also i think burak is right about using the exposure comp controls, but i don't know how to use it either on my d70!
i had problems with sharpness and was given the advice to use a smaller aperture, like f16, and it really helps. this also means your shutter will be heaps longer, eg: 15-30s+ depending on light and or ISO.
finishing up, have a play with the exp +/- controls, and see how you go. shooting RAW will also give you more control in the end.
cheers, look forward to seeing more, and learning from your results.
I see what you mean, not being very happy with it, although I must say, you set your standards very high - It's a pretty good photo, to say the least.
As to the sharpness, the flares around the lightsources, and the slight overexposure, that's something I also struggle with.
Looking at the camera settings, I think a smaller aperture (f/16 or smaller) would already be a start getting the exposure under control. Playing with the EV setting, as Burak suggests is a good means of tweaking the exposure, as is Timothy's advice, but I'm guessing that's already what you did. As to overexposing at smaller apertures, I'd measure for the brighter parts in the photo, not using average metering.
That leaves the option of bracketing the photo, and using PS HDR option to create a more subtle exposure.
The flares around the lightsources might be more difficult to control, as that could very well be induced by the humidity and dust in the air. Using a very clean prime lens would minimise the diffusion of the light through the lens, and although that might improve the image quality, I doubt if that would be visible on screen.
The vertical vanishing point is something which can be easily corrected, but I think it would already be an improvement. I would only start doing that if I were completely happy with the ground work, so to speak.
Correcting it is a matter of photoshop - Filter > Distort > Lens correction in CS2. Or, conventionally by transforming the entire image, using perspective, distort and scale tools. There's also a handy freeware tool available that will do what you need: Hugin, see: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/perspective/en.shtml .
The colours can be made more vivid in photoshop, and as long as the initial exposure is correct, any raw importer will give you the necessary tools to tweak the tones.
oh and not sure about perspective cropping, I'm guessing this is shot at 18mm where the fish eye effect is coming into play, perhaps for the bridge, try zooming a little?
James, you could try shooting a tad earlier in the night - that way you will get detail w/o the over exposure of the lights, what iso was the shot taken at? higher iso= more light but also more noise. trial and error is what makes digital shooting good fun my friend, this one isn't too bad I think, alightly less exposure would have been better. Also shooting in RAW will give you a lot more post-processing power
Nice work James. I like the picture. At the right side of the picture the area brightened is not wanted,so it would be good to turn the camera a little bit to left, by doing this you will allow a wider place at the left side of the building so it will be easier to correct the tilted building. and it is a little bit over exposed at the some part of the picture.I think it would be better to work with (-)EV values. Anyway I like the night pictures. All the best
0 
{K:49168} 2/2/2007
