[Emay]

A little advice for your night shots - always remember that a faster aperature knocks down the flaring around lights. This in turn gives you a more natural looking shot.

The repercussion is that you'll obviously get more background blur on things that you may have wanted in focus. Night photography has it's own little nitch and you will find it quite often does not have a landscape feel because of the industries fascination with natural night shots and the use of fast AP.

Another option is to merge exposures, not HDR, a true merge where you use the background of one and the foreground of another.

The first shot you did below was at 28mm F22 for 17 seconds and the result was very hot centers to all of the lights in the shot. The greens almost go white they are so hot. F8 is a happy medium, but looking in my lightroom statistics for my shots, 80% of my keepers are F11. Keep in mind some lenses act differently and the little flare I get at F11 with my 24-70 is very different from the flare my superwide generates. Familiarity to your equipment becomes important.

You also got some hard core lens flares from those lights, sometimes they look okay, most times they don't. Only way to stop that is move your feet, change the composition, use something to stop the way the light is landing on the lens etc.

Night photography goes against a lot of rules, it also has a lot of it's own rules which if ignored result in sub par pics or lots of editing time behind a PC.

I put a sample shot of one of mine below showing how much less color flare can be had, which brings more sharpness to the photo's appearance. This shot was at 4.5 it was the least flare I could get using my superwide:

Originally Posted by justin146 A few more pictures. Anyone have any advice?

[justin146]

Originally Posted by Emay A little advice for your night shots - always remember that a faster aperature knocks down the flaring around lights. This in turn gives you a more natural looking shot. The repercussion is that you'll obviously get more background blur on things that you may have wanted in focus. Night photography has it's own little nitch and you will find it quite often does not have a landscape feel because of the industries fascination with natural night shots and the use of fast AP. Another option is to merge exposures, not HDR, a true merge where you use the background of one and the foreground of another. The first shot you did below was at 28mm F22 for 17 seconds and the result was very hot centers to all of the lights in the shot. The greens almost go white they are so hot. F8 is a happy medium, but looking in my lightroom statistics for my shots, 80% of my keepers are F11. Keep in mind some lenses act differently and the little flare I get at F11 with my 24-70 is very different from the flare my superwide generates. Familiarity to your equipment becomes important. You also got some hard core lens flares from those lights, sometimes they look okay, most times they don't. Only way to stop that is move your feet, change the composition, use something to stop the way the light is landing on the lens etc. Night photography goes against a lot of rules, it also has a lot of it's own rules which if ignored result in sub par pics or lots of editing time behind a PC. I put a sample shot of one of mine below showing how much less color flare can be had, which brings more sharpness to the photo's appearance. This shot was at 4.5 it was the least flare I could get using my superwide:

Those shots of mine were my first attempt in a "city" at night; I still have alot to learn. I was actually playing with lens flares in some of them (like the one of the tall building)- I had the lens locked at max aperture. On some of them I used max AP because there wasnt alot of traffic and I wanted to keep the shutter open for more streaks. I have a few more I took at f/8-13, but they were mainly on closeups of buildings.

I will be shooting the square of my town this weekend. I have my 28mm prime now that I want to try, as well as the 18-70mm. I need to find that happy medium between tight AP for background detail and open AP/fast shutter for less flare/starbursts.

You know I have been playing with HDR alot- probably because I just discovered how easy it is. Here is one I did yesterday:

Oh, and thanks for the tips

[Jobra]

Save your money. Shoot in RAW. All those pictures I did are from an old DSLR camera and I just take them in RAW and usually edit the shit out of them.

[Emay]

Originally Posted by 04MustangGT Save your money. Shoot in RAW. All those pictures I did are from an old DSLR camera and I just take them in RAW and usually edit the shit out of them.

Always do that's mandatory -

Problem with not landing the shot straight from camera is the time vested in post process. It's fine for just a few shots, but when you come back from a weekend of shooting with 400+ keepers, last thing you want to do is PP for two weeks.

Justin, that's a nice HDR. I can't ride that train, HDR just is not for me.