Metering at night

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Deasy

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Hi Guys,

just wondering what your favoured method for metering night shots is?

I'm going up to the Clifton suspension bridge tonight aiming to get some shots as it looks very nice now with it's new lighting setup. I'm going to be shooting the whole bridge against a night sky.

I'll be shooting Delta 400 and printing myself so have a fair amount of latitude for errors, will probably bracket too to be on the safe side.

Thanks for any suggestions. :)
 
A tripod is a must as night photography invariably means longer exposures. I will always shoot at ISO 100 as i find i get the best results with this for longer exposures, especially with my d3000 performing poorly at higher iso.
 
I just starting the reply in my head of don't meter, shoot and adjust on the histogram when I got to the pertinent bit of your question.

It's going to be hard to get detail across the whole scene so it's a bit of a moving target really. Having the light sources as points of white is fine but you don't want massive white blooms around them.

If you have metering in your camera, then it's reading is going to be as a good a staring place as any but you're right, bracketing (and lots of it) is going to be a good idea.

I have many negs where I pointed my Pentax ME super at a night scene and it got it right on the money.
 
I tend to use the SIAS method (suck it and see). Make a rough guess, shoot, review on the rear screen and adjust exposure to suit.
 
There's a huge difference between a street scene at night and a few stars. You can have a go a neon lights etc using the normal exposure meter, and it might even be hand holdable.

For darker shots, set a long shutter speed and shift in full stops until it's right,. That is, keep halving or doubling your shutter speed - incremental changes won't do much, but it's also true that there is often quite a wide range of exposure levels that still look good at night.
 
I would also try to avoid closing down the aperture too much, else you'll get really pronounced "stars". Unless that's your thing of course.
 
It's best to use Manual i think and don't worry about metering,i don't !
I'm thinking where to place the AF point on where that will pick up because i think that's the main factor more than metering.
The exposure is all down to shutter times and not so much on aperture unless you want starbursts from lights at f22 and higher, I don't know i'd try f11 on a bridge maybe if i was there :)
 
what graham said.

the good thing about this time of year also, is that you're not freezing your knackers off waiting for the exposure / review time. i did some night stuff at salford quays in the ice and snow we had in january and my fingers were positively numb after about 3 shots.

but as far as metering is concerned, i'd take loads of shots right across the spectrum of shutter speeds - then you'll see which of the results you prefer best.
 
Ta chaps.

Just got back, I ended up shooting at f/8 and metered off a bit of pavement lit by street lights as a starting point. This gave me 10sec exposure so I bracketed 1 stop above and below.

Will dev the film tomorrow and see what I've got.
 
Deasy said:
Ta chaps.

Just got back, I ended up shooting at f/8 and metered off a bit of pavement lit by street lights as a starting point. This gave me 10sec exposure so I bracketed 1 stop above and below.

Will dev the film tomorrow and see what I've got.
Click to expand...

Oh I wondered what the Delta 400 was about!

If you're shooting film, you can get an idea of the exposure in difficult situations by shooting a test pic on digital and then copying the settings.

You'll get reciprocity failure with exposures over a few seconds though, which means you have to give film a lot more extra exposure to compensate than you would with digi.
 
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