Night time photography advice needed

scottduffy

scottduffy

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I had tried night time photography once and it was a pretty good night so i thought i would try it again and it turned out to be an absolute nightmare. I had taken photos of some light trails from a motorway flyover and had pretty good results using settings from 1 second to 30 seconds around f8-f16 using my cameras timer. I then went to Buchanan Street in Glasgow on Friday and tried to photography the decorations and lights and it all went wrong. I was hoping similar settings might work but they were a nightmare ranging from pictures full of motion blur from the shoppers at 1 second exposure to pure white totally blown out photos at 30 seconds exposure. Can someone please tell me how to photograph a scene when shoppers are in it but hopefully not have them all blurred. Should i just have taken the pictures at much higher speed? Would that have let enough light in? :shrug:
 
In order to freeze movement you require a suitably fast shutter speed. To bring other elements together you need to balance the aperture and ISO (or film speed) to get the exposure you require.

Xmas lights are hard as they are very bright and the street will be dark, thus it is hard to get the balancing act right!
 
If you are taking photos at night in the dark and wanting to get shoppers without any motion blur then you're either going to have to use a very high ISO to increase the shutter speed in the low light conditions or you'd have to try and rig up some artifical lighting to light the people.
 
I think i might be better heading back there at 4 or 5 am and taking the shot without the shoppers. It is a nice street at this time of the year and i was hoping to hand the photgraph in as part of a college paper so they actually might want shoppers in it. It's kind of cheating just dodging the issue of the shoppers eh? Thansk for your advice. I never even raised the iso past 200. I might give that a bash first.
 
Try opening the aperture up a bit more, that will let more light in a providing you are a distance away you should get enough of them in focus.

Have a look for a depth of field scale for the lens you will be using and try something like f4. http://www.dofmaster.com/doftable.html

If you pop your camera into that table and tell it which focal length you want to work at it tells you which part of your image will be in focus. You can see that at 10ft you only have 1ft in front and 1ft behind your subject to play with so 2 ft in total. But make that distance to your subject 20 ft and you have focal plane of nearly 10ft. That way you can keep the part of the pic you want sharp and let in more light without having to resort to bumping your ISO up. :)
 
I think the Christmas decorations on Buchanan St would look better with some motion blur from the shoppers, just so long as the lights are sharp and in focus. You could even try opening up your aperture and playing about with different DOFs and focal points.
 
Are you sure the lights will be on at 4am - lots of towns near me switch of at 12, council prudence and all that.

The simplest option is to go there in full dark and expose purely for the lights. Camera in manual, pick an aperture and stick with it - I'd suggest f/16 or thereabouts in the first instance, for DoF and light spill. Start with an exposure of just one or two seconds. If the image is too bright, shorten the exposure. Too dark, lengthen it. You will probably find that no people appear in your shots as away from the lights the remainder of the exposure is too dark to register. If people are appearing and they're ghosted, wait until you can see a few standing still and reshoot - maybe think when you're setting up about where this might happen.

Personally, I'd be out at twilight to balance the ambient with the decorations, and write off the moving people as the hustle and bustle of Christmas shopping ;)
 
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