One more question, please help.

[KarinaB1970]

Another question on night photography. The other night I wanted to take some pictures of a restaurant, outside and after dark. There are a couple of street lights, but not too close to the building. The building itself however, does have many many tea lights and a couple of lanterns outdoors that lights up the building and decking around it. It is very pretty. Again, I think this is a metering problem.... The shots came out very dark, even though the building was clearly lit. The camera here however, did allow me to keep the shutter open as long as I had wanted. Did some serious bracketing here and the pics did not look too bad on the LCD. Unfortunately not were really usable. What can you do in a situation like this to get the shot?

Thanks again :D

[JoeTampa]

the pics did not look too bad on the LCD. Unfortunately not were really usable


If you mean that they were still underexposed (too dark), then it is possible that your camera was changing the aperture to compensate for your changes in shutter speed. What you need to do is put the camera in Manual mode (if you haven't already) and change the shutter speed with the same aperture or adjust the exposure compensation to more overexpose the shot.

So, in other words, if you were shooting at 1/60 and f/3.5, you will want to change the shutter speed to 1/30 (or whatever works) but LEAVE the aperture at f/3.5. If your camera is raising it to f/5.6 (or whatever) to compensate for the slower shutter, you'll get the same exposure.



- Joe