Night Shots with DSLR

Tonight I tried for the first time shooting by night with the DRebel and I'm not very satisfied. I feel that something is wrong in the pics. Can't exactly say what, but I had better shots with the S30.
Does anyone has good experience with night shots with DSLR and help me to know what was wrong ? Thanks.

Yacine.

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They look OK to me. FYI, the really interesting (to me) "night" shots are taken while there's still a bit of evening light still in the sky.

Yes..I agree with PhotosGuy.... Your shots are great... (Paris.. What a lovely place to shoot).. Plus.... a slight glow in the sky really helps. Whenever possible, I try get a glow on the horizon. Black skies are kind of flat and sometimes pick up the tint of the surrounding lighting...

To get the effect, sometimes I'll go to a spot early and just sit for a while until the light is right. Also.. Most cities are lit with those cost effective, mercury free, highly efficient, but HORRID looking sodium vapor lamps.. These throw a very orange cast on cloudy skies.. I find a cloudless evening is the best.

I usually choose tungsten white balance to minimize the orange cast.. Or, I'll use the RAW white point eyedropper to select a white point in the scene.

Here's one I did last week that shows the blue glow sky effect......

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Very cool picture Jim.

Nice pic Jim. You're right. The blue glow sky effect adds a lot.
Do you keep your eye on the view finder during night shot ? (knowing that as the exposure time is long, it may introduce vibrations...)

Yacine, can you explain exactly what it is you think looks "wrong" or what it is that you don't like, and how those photos differ from what you got from your S30? That would enable the community here to give you specific advice.

well, first I didn't successed to get the right white balance. They look a little to yellowish to me. May be I have to play more with the white balance in the raw file... Then the sky is to dark. For instance in the second shot if I use a longer exposure time, the sky will be less dark but the eiffel tower becomes overexposed. I didn't successed to get a well exposed shot with a non black sky.

I did some more serious post-processing and get this time a better result...

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Very nice! Were these shot with the cheapo EF-S lens?
Congrats, thanks for sharing.

Thank you. Yes they were with the 18-55 EF-S lens.

Yes.. That's it.. Good shot.. The bit of blue in the sky seems to do it (for me anyway )

I still envy you getting to shoot around Paris

I had both an S30 and a G3 before getting my 300D, and I like doing night shots alot.
In my experience, the 300D beats the S30 and G3 in image quality by a nice margin, especially when it comes to noise at these longer exposures.
Plus, the 300D doesn't have to take a double picture for noise cancellation like the S30 and G3.

In my tests, the 300D has less noise at 30sec exposures than the G3 at 1/1000 exposures 8)

here's a 15s exp with the 300d & a sigma 12-24

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