Need Some Night Shooting Tips

[carney2]

I used my D200 to shoot some fireworks recently. They all came out white; very little color. I will be shooting dusk/night holiday street scenes in New York soon and am afraid that I will not be getting all of the color that is there. Any tips for this type of shooting?

[kingsmurf]

i've owed only 2 d-cams the Easyshare 3.2MP and the Photosmart 5MP and took a few good pics with them .. the best thing i can tell you is play around with your cam , off the lights and on a candle and play around with that ... i know it might sound like alot of work but it's best to know now then later ..... sorry i chouldn't help much ,,

[Grandpaw]

One of the resources that a lot of us just overlook is the tabs at the top of our site. Look at the tab named LEARN and then go down to the how to's tab and click on it. You will find a section on fireworks photography and others that may be very helpful, Jeff

[readingr]

The way I set about doing this is:

Camera on tripod, ISO 100, lock the mirror up and set the exposure for F22 @ 10secs as start point, then review and adjust up or down.

The thing is I have now got reasonably good at guessing time from the available light. So nightime photog can have exposures from 1/60th for moon shots to 2 minutes or more. So its really trial and error depending on the amount of light you have available.

The Canon light meter takes you up to 30 sec exposure but still check it for accuracy.

Roger

[another view]

Fireworks can easily fool a camera's metering system, and that's why the best results will be in manual mode. Fireworks are basically intense fire against a dark background so the meter will try to average that and get them both wrong by overexposing!

This isn't to say that most night scenes will be this difficult - try using Matrix metering but in some cases I've had better luck with Center Weighted in low light. Both have their limitations but should get you reasonably close. Check the histogram after a few shots to be sure you're getting the results you want.

[Mr Yuck]

Another shameless plug by Yuck. I wrote a little bit about night shooting in one of my website's photo tips article.

It's not the best article, the camera examples I used are a far cry from the Powershot A570 and my Rebel XTi, but the principles still apply...experiment...that's how I roll ;)