Night photos

[feenomenal]

I took some photos the other day of one of the buildings in the medical practice I work for. (They're huge on using photos of our buildings in our advertising. I'm the graphic artist.)

Anyway, I am reasonably pleased with the results, but wondered what I might have done differently to get a slightly cleaner shot. If you look at the 100% zoom in the 2nd photo below, you can see I have quite a bit of noise in the dark areas, and it's not terribly sharp.

I'm using a Canon Digital Rebel with the kit lens. I used the Tv setting, with a 1-second exposure (which I chose semi-arbitrarily). I don't have a lot of night photography experience. As I am writing this, I realized that I don't know what the aperture setting was since I let the camera pick it.

I used no external lights - the only lighting is from the lights on the building and a lamp post in the middle of the parking lot. Some of the building lights are blown out a bit in these photos.

Oh, regarding the composition of the photo, I took this with advertising in mind, so imagine text and other goodies overlaid in the space above the building. ;)

http://www.feenomenal.com/images/forums/building.jpg

And this is at 100%:
http://www.feenomenal.com/images/forums/building100percent.jpg

Many thanks!

[MT]

The EXIF info should give you that and the aperature as well.

Noise, long exposure, and high ISO go together. One option is to use something like NeatImage to clean it up.

[garethhhhh]

I saved the image to retrieve EXIF data, hope you don't mind. It looks like you used an ISO speed of 1600 and an apeture of 7.1.
The noise came from using ISO 1600, I would suggest using ISO 100 or 200. You will be using this for advertising so you want it to be as noise free as possible. :wink:

[garethhhhh]

Noise isn't very noticible with long exposures with the DRebel when you are using ISO 100. Just try not to use too long an exposure as you will start to get very slight, yet noticible, star trails

[feenomenal]

Hey, thanks! here's my embarrassingly dumb question. How do I view the EXIF info of any particular image? I never installed the software that came with the camera because I use a firewire card reader and my Mac (running OS 10.3.3).

[nomel]

Longer shutter speeds with lower iso will give you lower noise than higher iso with shorter shutter speeds. So, keep the iso down and increase the shutter time.

[garethhhhh]

How do I view the EXIF info of any particular image? I never installed the software that came with the camera because I use a firewire card reader and my Mac (running OS 10.3.3).

I use the FileViewerUtility that came with the camera, you don't have to have your camera plugged in to the computer to view the EXIF data though. Once you have copied the image to your computer open it using the FVU and all EXIF data will be displayed alongside the image.

I don't know if FVU works with a Mac but thats just the way I do it.

Seeing as how you will be editing this image a lot I would recommend you shoot in RAW since you will then have many more post processing options available to you, JPEG images are somewhat limited in this way. I am quite happy to use Photshop CS for all my RAW processing, however, most people here tend to recommend Capture 1 or BreezeBrowser.

Good Luck!

[Radtech1]

I can see why everyone got interested in the noise issue, but the thing for me that I see is a need to correct the perspective. Have you tried that? How does it look? Please post a F/U.

Rad

[ryuwulf]

i agree ISO 50 or 100 you will get less noise. You could use photoshop to correct this, but a faster method with is awesome is to use Noise Ninja.

This was made specifically for cases like yours. You simple choose the your profile ( i.e camera model, G3, camera iso, 400 etc)and it works it magic. Basically it adds a light gauzian blur for each pixel and smoothes it out. I used this product on many occasions for parties, and indoor shots that i had to take at higher speeds.