Long-awarted Indian Summer in Krakow  after rains brings me to overcome my laziness and fatigue after hard week: old town is nicely illuminated and this beauty must be stored for my friends. But first my attempt was frustrating…

I’m not a novice in photography, and I was ready to long exposure times and other problems, therefore for this session was taken a tripod. But a tripod alone is not a warranty of success. Next photo shows typical effect. 

Why it happens? An usual “consumer” tripod unable to provide absolutely stability, especially when you touching camera during opened shutter. Namelyit happens when to press a shutter button directly.  Camera was moved a little, result on a photo. Is it a solution? Yes, sure! In all cameras presents a self-timer with delay of 2-10 sec. How to use this mode, depends on your model. If you have problems to found this feature, refer user’s manual. 

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Next shot made with self timer. At least all is sharp.

Next problem: exposure metering. Night subjects have a very high contrast: black sky and glowing lamps. In such conditions standard metering modes  may give unwanted effects. 

As you probably know, the exposure meter collects data from many points on an image. The microcontroller processes this array, looks for the darkest and lightest points and places optimal, in its opinion, exposure somewhere near the middle point. The problem is night shots differ with dominant segments of low luminance, but your camera doesn’t know it. The logic of the processing program is oriented to look for optimal balance for showing both dark and light places and this task has its highest priority.

To correct this you should to use an exposure correction to inform the camera about the unusual conditions. Correction is measured in special units: “eV” or “exposure values”. This is not an absolute, but a relative value. Changing it by 1 eV means changing the light quantity by one aperture or shutter speed grade, or 2 times as mentioned earlier. Positive correction values are used for shooting of very light subjects, and negative for dark ones. 

For the described conditions you should set an exposure correction in the range -1…-2. To study which value should be set you can experiment. Try to take shots with different values and after some practise you will be able to set it up easily.

Next way: try to set “spot” metering. But be carefully by selecting a zone for metering: it must be not darkest and not brightest point on a shot

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Next problem is almost hopeless with point-and-shot cameras. With long exposure (above approx. 1 s) and especially with high ISO values (depending on your camera it may be ISO 400 or ISO 1600) on dark areas will be visible a noice. It looks like coloured pixels (see photo below. Sometimes this noice may be reduced with photo processing. This is a price for low-cost CMOS sensors. Try to set lowest ISO values manually. Yes, it calls longer exposure time, but with tripod it is not very critical. 

 

To be continued…