Shooting at night

[afrikaner07]

Hi Everyone,
Last night (19th of January) I went to campus to take some shots at night. It was freezing cold but I thought the shots would be worth it. When I got home and started looking at the shots (using elements 6) I was kind of displeased with the results. I had either white spots where I let too much light in or dark spots where not enough came in and so I lost detail. How do you shoot photos at night without losing details and yet not overexposing the photo. I took most, if not all, of my shots with Tv mode. Most of the shots also had a yellow hue to them. At first I started with auto white balance, but I then switched to something else, yet there was still a very yellow hue to the light. I use a Canon Powershot S5 IS, and I used a tripod for all of the shots with image stabilization off, and very limited wind. Some of the ones I liked the most I posted on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101) I hope that you might be able to tell me what I am doing wrong. I didn't do very much in post proc, messed some with the levels and an unsharp mask.
Thank you for your time.
Cheers,
Johan

P.S. In hindsight I realized I should probably say which ones I was wondering about:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2204866097/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2204862887/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2205635192/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2204832383/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2205703260/

[Duffy Pratt]

If you shot RAW, you have extremely wide latitude on what to do with the yellow cast. I kind of like it, but it will all depend on the look you are after. No-one expects night lighting to be particularly natural, and your pictures don't have much in the way of identifiable colors, so you can pretty much do what you want.

The contrast range at night tends to be beyond the scope of the human eye. It is way, way beyond the dynamic range of any film or sensor. So the best you can do is compromise. That means that you will almost inevitably blow out highlights and plug shadows. Moreover, if you solved the problem, and got everything nailed to proper exposure in a night shot, it would stop looking like night.

The converse is also true. In Hollywood, before they developed the more sensitive film shots, people used to go to pretty dramatic lengths to film Day for Night -- which basically used a variety of techniques to increase the apparent contrast so that stuff shot in daytime would look like it was shot at night. In effect, they were looking for the blown out lights and plugged shadows that you seem to want to avoid.

Duffy

[Dobick]

Johan,
I can't tell you what you are doing "wrong", but I can say that if you are wanting more control over the conditions, then you will probably want to switch off of Tv and move to full manual. For me, I like a very starred effect for the lamppost light, and a smaller aperture accomplishes that. Second, you might try starting with the incandescent WB, and then you might not have as far to move in post processing. Does the S5 have RAW capability?

I have always noticed that the lights at tech are extremely orange colored (I think that is a sodium vapor light) and as such you are going to have a tough time (even in post processing) getting rid of the color cast)

As far as the exposure is concerned -- if the primary subject is lit (like in "Old Man and Dog Statue" or even of Will and Soapsuds), then you can always lessen that impact by placing a jacket or some such other covering (just make sure it's not flammable) over the light and rely on other sources to light them as well.

[LWimages]

You will almost always get hot spots when shooting available lights at night. Most of the time, your meter will be on the middle strength light.

If you meter on the darkest part, you will have more hot spots. If you meter on the brightest, then the rest of your image will be really dark.

What Kent said, is correct. However, see my sentence above.
To overcome this (for available lights), take two exposures. One metered on the brightest spot, then another on the medium brightness. Then use Photoshop to merge the two together.
Since you're using a built-in flash in your photographs, use spot metering, and meter on the brightest spot. Let your flash fill in the lights for the rest of the scene.

Hope that helped.

[johnastovall]

Here's night work. Forget the flash just get fast lenses and shoot raw.

Dublin Nights...


Noctilux


Canon f/0.95

[afrikaner07]

Thanks everyone, I didn't know that the aperture would give me that starred effect, I like that as well, so I will be going full manual next time. Unfortunately my camera does not have RAW mode, and the smallest aperture it has is F/2.8. Which is not all that bad for a point and shoot I guess. Thanks for the idea of merging the two images, can Elements 6 do that? I will have to check my manual on how to use spot metering. How do you keep the difference between the two images minimized, since the brightest spot and medium spot might be at two different locations? Or do I use evaluative (which i think is just and average, so its medium I think) and then switch to spot, which will find the brightest spot? Sorry about all the questions, this stuff is just really interesting to me. And nice pics Stov. When I get myself a better camera I will definitely invest in some fast lenses. Thanks everyone for all your help, I will go try it out on Tuesday when theres a full moon, since I like to take shot of the full moon as well.

[Adrienne B]

I have a question about this too...

I have a incident light meter coming in the mail so I currently meter with my camera's meter. I usually just meter exposure and then stop it down a couple of stops... is this the best way of "guessing" when using a reflective meter? Will my incident meter read the scene like daytime and tell me to have a super long shutter in order to fill it with 18% gray light?

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by afrikaner07

<snipped>

. Thanks everyone for all your help, I will go try it out on Tuesday when theres a full moon, since I like to take shot of the full moon as well.

Remember the full Moon is just a landscape under full sun light. You can just use the 'sunny 16' rule for it.

[afrikaner07]

Ok, so I went out again and took some of yalls advice. I took ,for most of these photos at least, 3 shots. I shot in manual mode and the only why I could make it brighter was to change the shutterspeed. I would lock down my tripod after I have focused on what I wanted, pressed the manual focus button to lock down the focus, and then I would arranged what I wanted into the frame. I wasn't really sure how to merge photos by only using Elements so I would have the three different shots into layers and then messed with the visibility to let certain things come out...I wasn't sure which to put as the background layer so it varied at times between the lightest, darkest and middle brightness. I then messed with the noise filter and did some noise reduction to soften the picture. You can see all these pictures on my Flickr site, here a link to some of the ones I personally like more than the others. Any help and suggestions would REALLY be appreciated. I took these shots with my Canon Powershot S5 IS since that is all I have.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2230125374/ -sharpened
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2230122608/ - sharpened
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2230119368/ -sharpened
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2229320085/ -softened version
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2229317707/ -softened version
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2230107562/ -softened version
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2230105518/ -softened version
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2229311331/ -softened version
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2229309071/ -softened version
http://www.flickr.com/photos/africaneze101/2229307175/ -softened version

Sorry about all the links, and thanks for all the help so far =D It really helped.