Doing night photography adds some additional challenges compared to daylight photography.
Being familiar with the camera in manual mode as well as being able to manually focus is essential.
I always focus manually as most of my shots are taken in low light – a time when the camera has difficulties to autofocus.
Some of the lenses that I shoot with are manual only anyway. E.g. the Zeiss 35mm – my favorite lens.

Shooting cityscapes means dealing with large contrasts (head lights from cars, illuminated buildings, street lights,…)
Then there are very dark parts to a night shot. Usually the sky (depending on how late it is), trees, etc.
It is very hard to expose and have both the highlights and the shadows exposed without burning out the highlights or just having black areas where the shadows should be. This is when I like to use HDR. However the shot I am sharing with you today is straight from camera.

“Arch and Champs”

One of the reasons I did not want to use HDR for the above image, is because I wanted to really bring out those stars of the street lights. Many people usually think you need some kind of star filter (they do exist). However you really don’t need one. Just shoot at f/22 and they appear automatically (caution image quality degrades a little at apertures this high). Had I shot a HDR (and thus exposed for the sky with a longer exposure) the overall contrast would have decreased and the street light stars would not be as prominent anymore.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 12:44 am and is filed under Locations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.