First Night Shots - Train Station

[bfurbush]

Hi everyone,

First post so be gentle - taken with my week-old Rebel XT and a tripod, first night shots and I think they have some room for improvement at the very least, but a decent first effort - comments, suggestions and criticism would be extremely helpful!

Taken at f/8.0, ISO 100, 1.6 second exposure. First is normal, second is B&W using hue/saturation layers in CS2.

Any way to eliminate / cut down on the flaring in the street lights in this type of shot? I had a lot of problems with overexposure of the lights, but that was the only way to get a good long exposure given that it was pitch black out.

-Brian

[SWPhotoImaging]

It is a very difficult situation whan you have dark areas and lights directly in the shot. Sometimes a blended image is the only way to reduce the glare of the lights.

I think you did pretty well on this, except for the slight tilt of the image.

[BottomBracket]

I agree with Steven, at a night time shot where you include the light source. You will almost always have to take several shots so that you can blend the light and dark areas> An alternative would be to to underexpose a bit, perhaps a stop, to avoid blowing out the lights too much and then bring back the shadow details in PP. Did you do a straight desaturation? Also, one more tip would be to have a main subject in the pic that can rally the eye to it. Keep on shooting, welcome to the forum!

[bfurbush]

Thanks for both your comments - there was no particular area to have a main subject on the train tracks, I was trying to achieve kind of a long perspective down the tracks....don't think I pulled it off very well but it's a start.

I thought about underexposing or shooting in RAW and fixing WB that way, but I'm not too familiar with bringing back shadow details in PP. As for the desaturation, I didn't do any on the first shot, but for the second I created two hue/sat layers, made one completely desaturated and played with the hue on the other to achieve the desired effect in B&W.

Thanks again - I'll post more as I can, and any additional thoughts / comments would be great.