overexposure problem

hi all , am still beginner in this type of photography , i saw many shots for the stars within the city or as landscape shots , i watched and read some tutorials to learn how to capture such shots , but still couldnt achieve it , whenever i use high iso , 3200 for example , f/3.5 and 30s shutter i still get white pic , without any details , so is there is any clear tutorial that i can learn from ?
does any one have a pic showing the stars before blending it with another shot ?

thanks for helping

Shoayb Hesham wrote in post #14721728
hi all , am still beginner in this type of photography , i saw many shots for the stars within the city or as landscape shots , i watched and read some tutorials to learn how to capture such shots , but still couldnt achieve it , whenever i use high iso , 3200 for example , f/3.5 and 30s shutter i still get white pic , without any details , so is there is any clear tutorial that i can learn from ?
does any one have a pic showing the stars before blending it with another shot ?

thanks for helping

You are on the right path friend. You are certainly overexposing at this point and the easiest way to correct this is to either cut down that iso speed and leave the shutter at 30 seconds or use a faster aperture than f/3.5. ISO 3200 is going to give you an awful lot of noise depending on the camera you use, if its a 5D mark 3 then you're fine but on a crops sensor I would stay under ISO 400. If you are shooting iso 400 or less then you need long exposure times 30 seconds or greater. If you are still over exposing then cut the time down to 15 seconds and so on. You can experiment with ISO 3200 if you like but I would imagine that you would need a very short exposure time between 5 and 10 seconds for a night city, maybe less than that, but once again there will be alot of noise if you are using a crop sensor. Also one more tip I can give is to make sure you are shooting manual for night time exposures and be sure to set the white balance to tungsten or fluorescent, depending on the type of light being given off by the city. Good luck

thank you so much for the reply
actually i tried that but still couldnt see the stars clearly , either i get just the foreground or an overexposed pic

just an example to what i mean :
http://www.abinali.com …/1295757587_4J6​J6822s.jpg

http://a5.sphotos.ak.f​bcdn.net …03944360_199706​4213_n.jpg

Those two have probably cheated (the second one I'm 100% sure, the first one not so much). For that second photo, he took the sky separately and then photoshopped it back in. That kind of shot requires stacking a bunch of short exposures and is quite a bit of work. You won't get a picture like that with a single exposure.

Oh ok yea the second one is definitely multiple stacks, you cant see stars like that above a city because there is too much light pollution so that is complete photoshop trickery. In the first image if he is using a 5D3 he could pretty much shoot at ISO 12,800 without noise. I do see some star trails in the top left corner which tells me that he did a long exposure. Try these settings for a similar shot. ISO 100, aperture of f/5.6, shutter speed set to bulb exposure; you will need a remote to do this. Expose 1 shot for 50 seconds if under exposed then go to 70 seconds then 120 seconds until you overexpose again. Once you overexpose start to cut back 10 seconds until you have a good exposure. You will get some star trails but they will be small, similar to the first image you posted. If the city is still out of focus after all of this then try increasing the aperature to f/8. As you increase the aperture you will have to expose the image longer because the hole the aperture makes gets smaller and smaller letting in less light but allowing more DOF, depth of field, to come into focus. Hope this helps.

calypsob wrote in post #14726008
In the first image if he is using a 5D3 he could pretty much shoot at ISO 12,800 without noise. I do see some star trails in the top left corner which tells me that he did a long exposure. Try these settings for a similar shot. ISO 100, aperture of f/5.6, shutter speed set to bulb exposure; you will need a remote to do this. Expose 1 shot for 50 seconds if under exposed then go to 70 seconds then 120 seconds until you overexpose again.

That would definitely blow the lights of the city though, so like I said it's probably masked back in.