Tong Family

Ryan has given all of us some great tips about taking the very hard to take night cityscape shots and firework shots. I’ve been reading quite a bit about these techniques, but he really has some great tips. Here they are for the next time you need to take an impressive night time display:

# Get a tripod. This is really important as these are long exposure shots. I’d recommend the Gitmo 1540 if you have the cash and a Markins Q3 Emilie as a ballhead.
# For nightshots, if you want to make the clouds fuzz and see the car and boats make a pleasing streak, but keep everything that is static in focus, then go the Aperture priority (the “A” on a Canon or Nikon) and set the f-stop to F/11 and set the ISO to 100 to get a nice long high resolution exposure. Set the exposure compensation to -0.7EV or so, but you can experiment with this to see how bright you want it. Set mirror lockup and timed delay to 2 seconds, so you can just press the button and nothing is going to move.
# For nightshots where you want to see things sharply, go to Shutter priority and set this for 1/30th of a second and F-stop to F4 or so, then crank the ISO to probably 800 at least. This should freeze the frame.
# For fireworks, set the exposure to Bulb, that is the shutter will go on for as long as you want. Set the aperture to F/11 and ISO 400. Now make sure you are in a really dark location. Put your hand in front of the lense to block the light. Click the shutter, this will open the shutter. When you see the explosion, remove your hand. The camera is now recording the image. Block again. You can do this a couple of times, so you get multiple explosions on each frame. Since in effect, your hand is the shutter, you will get multiple exposures on the same picture. NOrmally, you will need about 2 seconds or so of exposure, but it is fun to experiment!