Night time photo's!

Fancy That

Hi all,

I have a sony T77 which i find to be a super camera. I was wondering what settings you would use to capture a nighttime setting...eg...photos in times square, new york considering the amount of neon lights etc....

As often as i use the camera, I can never seem to get it right at night time.

Any help would be appreciated......;)

pixbyjohn

Have you used a tripod whilst taking night shots?

m_s_nixon

a tripod is a must for night time photography, although times square would be pretty forgiving to someone with a steady hand. use anything you can lean on to try and steady your shot. I'm not familiar with the camera, does it have manual settings or just preset modes?

Chorcai

Give a list of lenes you have and the lads here will quickly tell you, tripod + fast lens is per-norm for night stuff. (utter newbie here !)

KarmaGarda

From a quick look at the camera you posted it seems to be a very good compact camera. To confirm, this is it here?

Here's what I would recommend for night photography:

It seems to be able to use 1600 iso, find this setting (if it can be manually set) and use 1600 for night time. The only issue it may have is it will probably struggle focussing. But if you're patient with it you should still get good shots.

Hope this helps! Report back your results

KarmaGarda

Further to my reply, iso at 1600 will produce slightly noisier photos so just be aware of that.

On a side note, should we move this to the main part? It's not really related to "digital darkroom" and will probably get more replies.

5uspect

Here are some of the specs of the camera:

Basically a super compact and I don't see any manual modes there.

This makes things difficult as you sometimes have to fool such cameras into doing things to get anything creative out of them.

On a manual camera you can vary exposure length, aperture size to get interesting effects. Long exposures for example give you cool light trails and wide apertures give you nice shallow depth of field.

I would echo everyone else by saying that you should invest in a tripod.
You can get nice small ones that should be easy to carry around in your pocket. Compose your shot and put the camera on timer. That way there's absolutely no motion when the shot is taken.

Regarding ISO. This is basically the gain the camera applies to the signal it records. Nightvision, to give an extreme example, has super high gain to amplify the little light that is available (unlike the IR version you see on TV).

When you increase ISO you add noise, or "uncertainty" to the image. This makes the picture look fuzzy. Many compacts add special filters to smooth the noise but this makes the image look soft and blurry.

If I were you I would put the camera on a tripod and set the ISO to it lowest setting. This will force the camera to use a long exposure to compensate. This will give you interesting effects with moving lights. Increase the ISO and repeat.

You can vary a setting called the Exposure Compensation (EV) in most compacts. This is the closest most of them offer in terms of manual controls. This lets you tweak the level of brightness. You may have to lower this if you images come out too bright.

This can happen because the camera doesn't know it is night time. Therefore it tries to give you a bright exposure. Some cameras have special modes such as party mode or night time mode to allow for this.

CabanSail

I agree with the above .... but from the Specs the longest shutter speed is only 1/4 sec which may not get the night time effects you are seeking.

These compacts are really optimised for general snapshot photography & they struggle to do a lot which is considered creative.

5uspect

1/4s isn't all bad for some sort of streaking with moving cars or fast panning.

pullandbang

5uspect wrote: »

1/4s isn't all bad for some sort of streaking with moving cars or fast panning.

Except for that bloody time delay between pressing the button and the shot being made. I'd say it would be difficult enough to pan with a bridge or P&S.
Used to drive me mad on my non dslr cameras and AFAIK it's a feature of them all.

5uspect

pullandbang wrote: »

Except for that bloody time delay between pressing the button and the shot being made. I'd say it would be difficult enough to pan with a bridge or P&S.
Used to drive me mad on my non dslr cameras and AFAIK it's a feature of them all.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I didn't mean panning with a moving subject in focus and tracked. I just meant weird and wonderful neon light trails.

Fancy That

Hey Guys,

Thank you so much for all your help with the above. yes 5uspect and karmagarda that is the exact camera.

It will be next month before i get to try out my new found expertise with night time photography!! I'l keep you posted.

Thanks again.....:)