Night Photography in a City: A tutorial teaching exposure compensation; HDR; and bracketing Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

hi I'm Tony Northrup and for my book
stunning digital photography I'm in
Glasgow Scotland and George Square to
show you how to take night pictures in a
city now my pictures in a city are much
easier than taking them in rural areas
because cities are populated with this
light all the time that allows you to
autofocus and even handhold your camera
at some higher ISO so the first thing
I'll do is I'll show you the easy way to
take a night shot which is just to set
your camera to a really high ISO and
then take a snapshot handheld so my
camera said at ISO 6400 and now go ahead
and take a shot of the building behind
me
that gave me a shutter speed of about
one twentieth of a second which on the
super wide angle lens was enough for me
to handhold it
no that's good enough for your Facebook
page but if you zoom in there you'll see
it's really really noisy and this
cameras about as good as you're going to
get for low noise at high ISOs so like I
said it's okay if you want to just post
it on Facebook but if you want to get a
nice print out of it or maybe you want
to sell it commercially you're going to
want to get some better quality so I
always shoot at ISO 100 so if you're
going to do that you're going to get
shutter speeds of about four seconds in
cities and you can't hand hole handhold
for that kind of length you're going to
need to put your camera on a tripod so
what I'm going to do is I'm going to set
my camera to ISO 100 and then put it on
the tripod the camera Auto exposed at
three seconds and that's a much better
shot than the previous one as you can
see the noise is much much lower but
looking at the histogram it's not ideal
now if you just look at the cameras
preview for a night shot it's going to
look pretty good but you want to work on
the histogram at night you want to make
sure that the right side is populated
because anything on the left side of the
histogram is going to still be very
noisy even at ISO 100 so for single
night shots I like to make sure that the
right edge has just a little bit of
lights climbing up it you want to expose
the brighter lights enough that the
picture overall is balanced so I'm still
going to use auto exposure but I'm going
to increase the exposure compensation
just one stop now that gave me a six
second exposure and to your eye that
might seem a little bit overexposed but
what you can do is bring it in to your
computer at home and then drop the
exposure a little bit adjusting the
exposure down will still give you the
benefits of the reduced noise while
giving the appearance that you want now
to take it even one step further you can
bracket it and then combine them into an
HDR shot so I'll enable bracketing on my
camera now and take a shot so my camera
is taking three bracketed shots each two
stops apart back at the computer I'll be
able to combine those together it will
use the shadows
from the overexposed photo and the
highlights from the underexposed photo
this provides a greater dynamic range
that I could get in a single shot this
does a couple of things one it provides
much more detail in areas that would
otherwise be dark or overexposed it
reduces noise in the picture overall but
most importantly it increases the
dynamic range of the picture now there's
one more quick tip such a camera to
delay the release of the shutter I like
to do use this a two second shutter
delay that's enough to eliminate any
camera shake that you might get from
pushing the button itself you'll find a
lot of your pictures might be shaky even
if you use a nice sturdy tripod just
because your finger shakes the camera a
little bit so this was for my book
stunning digital photography which has
an entire chapter on night photography
as well as technical details like
understanding the relationship between
ISO and shutter and aperture and how to
use your histogram you can check it out
on Amazon or on iBooks and if you liked
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photography thanks
professional photography did yes oh okay
god bless you