night time photography help

so i found out this past weekend at daytona that my night time pic skills suck.. i am still learning, i use a canon digital with mostly auto setting was wondering if anyone had any advise or good links to help me out..

thanks chris b

Might be a stupid question, but what are you shooting? If you're trying to shoot a moving car, you're going to need a fast shutter speed and a lot of light, either by flash or a wide aperture setting. "Panning" or moving the camera along with the subject will eliminate a lot of blur.

Try this article: http://www.adorama.com/alc/0008441/article/100-in-100-Part-II-Photographing-race-cars-at-night

High ISO (film) speed may help along with more light/wider aperature/ slower shutter speed.

The great thing about modern cameras is you can jack the ISO to the sky and still get great results.

In general, though, you're going to be shooting between 1/20th and 1/100th depending on the ambient light. I like to shoot as wide open I I can on aperture because I like that look, so for me that usually means f4 on my good long lenses. From there you can fine tune with ISO. Lots of ambient light at Daytona meant I could shoot as low as 800ISO and still get great results. But even going all the way to 3200 and beyond is pretty safe on modern cameras.

jg

EDIT: Here's a few of my Daytona shots. This year i was really interested in playing with flare, which is why there's a bunch of that. If you want any specific specs on any of the photos just ask. http://s216.beta.photobucket.com/user/jpasterjak/library/Rolex%2024%20at%20Daytona%202013?

Post some more details of your camera. If it's a DSLR you can think about technique and jacking up ISO; if it's a small-sensor point-and-shoot without an optical viewfinder, you're never going to get consistent results.

canon rebel T1i eos 500d.. th lense i use the most is a 200 250 zoom.. all auto.. its the first "real" camera i have had that is digital.. not sure what my iso is set at...i have had it about a year and really want to get good with and have learned alot in a short time but still have a ways to go.. i think my day shots are pretty good.. just need to learn night shooting.. and i shoot mostly racing.. this is about a 1/3 of what i shot at daytona..

http://s1163.beta.photobucket.com/user/barnca2010/media/rolex%202013/disney2013346_zps18e27f70.jpg.html#/user/barnca2010/media/rolex%202013/disney2013346_zps18e27f70.jpg.html?&_suid=1359681282272006222279172951117

Already good ideas have been posted: High ISO, pan the shot, wide open aperature, long shutter speed depending on the subject. You can try rear curtain sync flash (which might be too much if you're a noobie), where the flash pops at the end of a shot instead of the beginning.

For stationary you can also try experimenting with painting with light: open shutter on "bulb" setting (holds it open till you say stop) and pop a flash (or even use a flash light) in different places around the subject and literally paint with light.

Flashes. Lots of flashes. Like this:

slefain wrote: Flashes. Lots of flashes. Like this:

Love O. Winston Link! I have, or rather my son has, his book The Last Steam Railroad in America. Amazing what the man did with flashbulbs--lots of flashbulbs! We've been to the O. W. L. Museum in Roanoke, and also the Transportation Museum, where J-Class #611 rests. Stayed at the nearby Hotel Roanoke, which was built in 1882 by the N & W railroad. Cool trip for train buffs!

You need a tripod to shoot good nighttime pictures like this:

And, yes, you can find small tripods for point-and-shoot cameras.

Yeah, get a tripod of some sort and get a remote shutter button, so the camera is stable. Learn about F-stop, exposure times, and how to read the light meter in your camera. I personally avoid using the flash at all costs.

In reply to slefain:

That shot is awesome - thanks for turning me on to O. Winston Link.

I have a few good night shots at Daytona. The key was renting a Canon 2.8f 75-200 IS Ultrasonic lens for $100 for the week.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4254476087750.2148024.1461252027&type=3

Having the appropriate access to the track helps, too.

I have been looking for the best free hosting website for my photos. So far, this message board is the best I've seen!

Sput wrote:

I assume that's when the fog rolled in? That's some sick-ass Bladerunner shiz right there.

Where'd you get the lens? And additional fees? Spill, spill. jg

The photo of the #10 was at 6:30 AM, just as the fog started rolling in. Some great shots during that time.

For the second year, I rented the lens at Southeast Camera here in Wilmington, NC. Actually the rental was $100 last year and $120 this year. Picked it up Wednesday and dropped it off Monday. I've seen used ones for sale for $1,000 - $1,400.

But this is the only time I shoot moving race cars in the dark. Maybe if I went to some Lemons or Chump car events that ran into the night I might rent it again. Thing is, I would need someone to start paying me for that.

10% is a small price to pay to find out that you don't like a $1300 piece of equipment. And en even smaller price to pay if they apply some or all of the rental fee to a sale if you buy it on the spot. I may look into something like that for the Nurburgring this year.

jg

Oh yeah - as for the camera settings. I set the Canon on tv, shutter priority. I set the ISO all the way up to 1600m as high as my camera goes. The #10 and #91 photos were 1/200sec. The blue #90 with sparks was 1/125sec.

Nikon D5100 with my kit lense 55-300mm in nascar 3-4 no flash

1/160 F 5.3 ISO 6400

ISO 5000 on this one

ISO 3200 on this one . No flash on all of them

BARNCA wrote: canon rebel T1i eos 500d.. th lense i use the most is a 200 250 zoom.. all auto.. its the first "real" camera i have had that is digital.. not sure what my iso is set at...i have had it about a year and really want to get good with and have learned alot in a short time but still have a ways to go.. i think my day shots are pretty good.. just need to learn night shooting.. and i shoot mostly racing.. this is about a 1/3 of what i shot at daytona..

Next to composition (which has general rules of thumb, but is really an art), the most important thing affecting the quality of the photo is the exposure. You need to control that yourself, so get the camera out of auto mode. My camera spends most of its time in Av (aperture priority, where I select the aperture and the auto exposure circuitry selects the shutter speed), but I also use M (manual) a lot and Tv (shutter priority, which is the opposite of Av) occasionally. Each has its uses.

Do you understanding the relationships between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO in determining the exposure? Each of those three settings will increase the effective light level of the resulting image, but they all have side effects. Sometimes those effects are desirable, sometimes not, and you need to select the exposure settings accordingly. There's a good book on this topic called "Understanding Exposure", link

For night-time race car photography you're going to want a shutter speed fast enough to avoid camera shake (but slow enough that you get some wheel spoke blur) as wide an aperture as you can get, and push the ISO up to the point where that results in a properly exposed image. Unfortunately, with relatively low cost equipment this is probably going to result in a soft image with a lot of noise, but hey that's better than no images at all, right?

A few basic tips on the composition side: when you're photographing things that move, the photo typically looks better if there is more open space in front of the subject than there is behind it -- room for the car to "move into". If you're using the center focus point (which is usually the best one on a lower-end camera body), then you might try keeping that on the subject and then cropping the resulting image afterwards to cut out some of the empty track behind the car.

You also typically want some parts of the photo to be blurred -- simply freezing all motion with a very high shutter speed results in a car that looks like it's parked on the road. The panning technique that various people have mentioned is useful here, you also want to make sure that the wheel spokes have some blur to them.

I highly recommend learning some post-processing techniques. I'm not talking about the outright image manipulation & fabrication that photoshop is known for, but simple things like cropping the image, adjusting the exposure by small amounts, tweaking the colors, adding contrast, etc can make a HUGE difference in the final product. I use a software package from Apple called 'Aperture' for this, Adobe has a similar product called 'Lightroom'. They're not terribly expensive, and I think they both have free trials available (they used to, at least).

The great thing about digital photography compared to film is that the feedback loop is much tighter and there's no sense that every time you press the shutter button it's costing you thirty cents to develop it. :) So take lots of pictures, experiment with stuff, throw out the things that didn't work, and only show the best!

Another thing to consider is where you're taking your light reading. If you're camera is taking multiple readings around the frame, you could end up with some not so nice exposures. I typically measure from the light source I want to capture and go from there. Many of the issues I see with night photography come from overexposure not underexposure.

Other than that, there is some great info in this thread!

I have a lower end Canon EOS Rebel. So I'm limited to 1600 ISO. I've found the higher the ISO setting, the more noise in the picture. I also prefer to not use the flash when shooting the semi-lit evening and night photos. For software, I use the Canon software that came with the camera.

The slower shutter speeds and panning result in a lower keeper rate, but that's what the delete button is for. One more;

I totally read the title as 'night time pornography help'. Not surprisingly, I still ended up with my pants off after scrolling through it.