Tips for shooting fun fair at night

One of the largest fun fairs is at our town this week and I would like to get so good night shots.

What seeting do you suggest for getting lights streaking on big wheel etc

I want to find out too! And, I think you should post a couple of your photographs after the fair! I wanna see!

bulb setting, tripod, AND EXPERIMENT with your cable release...1 second.....right up to 5 seconds and sometimes even more or less....its a matter of experimentation with night shots - they are very easy ones mastered...
Set your camera to f5.6 on ISO 100, focus to infinity.

Del

This is probably a dumb question but is there a special way to focus ti infinity

I think the most important aspect is to get the timing right. Things like fun
fairs always look better if there's still a little (but not too much!) natural light in the sky. But it's tricky to judge when is exactly right. (I'm sure if I did this all the time - and if I were organised, which I'm not! - then I'd work out the best time by taking meter readings from the sky, but I've never done that.) So my advice would be to start shooting just after the sun goes down, say around 9:30, and be prepared to take the same shot 2 or 3 or 4 times until about 11:00 by which tinme it will be dark.

I'll try to dig out some examples I shot recently to show the difference it makes.

Cheers Stewart

OK, here are a few examples of the effect that the sky has as the evening progresses. I couldn't find any suitable shots of a fun-fair, but I think these illustrate the general effect just as well.

These photos were shot on June 7th in Vancouver. Sunset was at 21:02.

Take 1 - 21:06, 1/4 sec @ f/3.5

Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

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Oops! There must be a way of attaching more than one photo. But for the time being, here's Take 2:

Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Hmmm. How about if I put all four images into one file and try attaching that?

Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

The reason you can't see them is that they are pointing to your F drive on your PC hehe

No problem. They need to be either uploaded onto here or hosted on another site and then the image code would look like this for the hosting on another site

[IMG]http://www.thedomain.c​om/thepicture.jpg[(/)i​mg] delete the round brackets

I am about to go and have just relised I forgot which would be the best lens to use:

17-85 f/4-5.6
70-300/f4.5-5.6
300 f/4

Probably too late and I will just have to experiment

If you are trying to post a JPEG that's less than 800 pixels in the longest dimension, and no more than 100KBytes in size (which are the guidelines for the forum), press Go Advanced, then Manage Attachments. Make sure that the attachment has uploaded and there's not an error at the top of the screen before posting the message.

David

Ok, here goes again. The JPG is 702x471 and 64kB. The sequence of the shots should be obvious:

Take 1 (21:06) ..... Take 3 (21:51)
.....
Take 2 (21:41) ..... Take 4 (22:01)

EDIT:Thanks DavidW !

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Focusining to infinity - turn your focus ring to full focus (to the symbol that looks like a sideways 8)

Be careful - on many lenses you can focus past infinity (which looks like a sideways 8) - Del got caught out by the forum turning 8) into a smiley. The ability to focus past infinity exists to allow for situations such as temperature affecting the lens, and shooting infra-red (with a suitable filter or modified camera).

David

hahaha oops...yes 8 i mean 8! not smiley face 8) hehe!