Night urban photography

[adam27]

Hi guys, had a search and couldnt find anything that answered my question. (I appologise as im sure its been asked before)

I am going out tonight for my second attempt at shooting some night time stuff in the city center. My first try wasnt to succesful as most of them had an orange glow, i assume due to the streetlights.

This is the style i am aiming for - http://www.scenephotography.co.uk/main.php

sorry i cant get a direct link, but the images i aiming for is in the exhibition folder.

So could anyone give me an insight as to what kind of setting i should be using on my nikon d40. Do i need lens filter, custom white balance, alot of post processing etc? I am assuming its a mix of all of these.

Any help would be very much appreciated, Thankyou Adam

 

[martsharm]

Hi Adam

The trouble with street lighting (I assume you're talking about the orange sodium lights very common everywhere), is that it's not just biased to one colour temperature, it's just orange. So you get very little, if any, colour rendition, in the absence of any other artificial light. On location, you could try some diffused flash to get some white light into the scene when shooting.

The quickest way to get rid of the orange is to convert to black and white, then you're done.

The examples from the site you quoted are a little bit more interesting. They have managed to get some colour, but you'll notice it's rather desaturated, and it's difficult to tell if the colours are accurate or not. However, the street lamps are bright white. I can only guess what they've done here, maybe a B&W conversion with artificial colour tint. Or maybe they've used the Photoshop/Lightroom eyedropper tool over the orange light to make it the white point, which would alter the colour of the whole scene. I might try this later to see what happens.

[after looking at Wikipedia...]

Sodium light is monochromatic @ 589.3nm. If you can isolate this wavelength and desaturate 100%, you should be able to convert the orange light to white light. Be careful you don't remove the wavelength altogether, otherwise all you'll get is black.

Or maybe Nottingham has bright white fluorescent lights instead of sodium lights?

Those sunstars they are getting from the street lights look just like the ones I get from my Sigma 10-20 by the way.

 

[RobC]

Hi guys, had a search and couldnt find anything that answered my question. (I appologise as im sure its been asked before)

I am going out tonight for my second attempt at shooting some night time stuff in the city center. My first try wasnt to succesful as most of them had an orange glow, i assume due to the streetlights.

This is the style i am aiming for - http://www.scenephotography.co.uk/main.php

sorry i cant get a direct link, but the images i aiming for is in the exhibition folder.

So could anyone give me an insight as to what kind of setting i should be using on my nikon d40. Do i need lens filter, custom white balance, alot of post processing etc? I am assuming its a mix of all of these.

Any help would be very much appreciated, Thankyou Adam

I'm sure someone will be along to correct me, but when I shoot at night I set my WB to Tungsten - it seems to work/help reduce the amount of pp I have to do.

 

[martsharm]

I'm sure someone will be along to correct me, but when I shoot at night I set my WB to Tungsten - it seems to work/help reduce the amount of pp I have to do.

Actually that reminds me, set your white balance to something, anything (might as well try Tungsten as above) but not auto, otherwise the frequency of the streetlights will vary from shot to shot and you won't be able to apply the same settings to each shot.

My preferred way of setting WB is to activate Live View (if available), compare the screen to the scene, and adjust the Kelvin value until they match.

 

[adam27]

Thankyou for the replys, i am almost certain the light in the photos are not white as coincidentally i have shots from some of the exact same locations.

I will give your suggestions a try. I contacted scene photography directly and they were very helpful, I will be going to speak to them next week sometime.

Cheers Adam