Alright these were both taken on a tripod, first one at 200iso and the 2nd at 400iso. is there anything else I should work on to make these look better like distance, focusing, or anything else like that?? Just trying to get a feel for this. Thanks

 

I like em. Love how the headlights look.

 

Did you manually set exposure or let the camera go for it? If it's auto exposure, depending on whether it was spot or area evaluating the bright headlights could be a bad thing.

Generally for night shots I like to manually set exposure. If you are on a tripod give it a few seconds and play with it back and forth to see what you get, overxposed can be nice at night (and your headlights are already bown out anyway so no loss there).

But number one, if you are taking pictures by street light, do a white balance. Get a piece of white or gray paper, hold it in front of your camera and use the white balance feature (read your manual for exactly how to) in the same lighting as your subject (ie walk up near your car to do the white balance). This will take out the nasty yellow tint you are getting.

You can fix this in most photo editing programs by finding a true white spot in your picture and telling your program that's white (like maybe the fire hidrant) but it's always better to really white balance than try to fix later.

If you white balance and then tinker with the exposure you will have most of the battle taken care of, after that it's just experience with how to shoot with your own camera and how to shoot overall.

Oh and considering the range and shot you have hear, I would say go for the lowest aperature possible. You want all the light you can get in the lense and your DOF control will be limited at this range anyway unless you want to stand way back and zoom a lot.

Oh and if you want to have some real fun with night shots (or any shot that has a lot of high dynamic range, night shots often do especially if a light source is in frame) check out HDR techniques... to do it properly you will need to bracket at least 3 exposures and do somme handiwork, but the effect can be really nice.

 

much thanks for the info. ill definatly look into and working at the other things you mentioned. gonna take a while but im really into learning this. I used manual exposure though but I just had the exposure dead in the middle each shot. so ill try overexposure next time. thanks for the info though

 

did somebody steal your antenna?

 

If you are looking at exposure and it's in the middle of sommething, you are looking at exposure compensation. You can use that, but I suggest you actually set exposure longrer (ie shutter open for 1 or 2 seconds, on a manually adjustable camera this may be available in Program, Manual and Shutter Speed Priority mode - those are canon names, other brands may name them something else).

Check out dpreview.com for lots of photo heads with lots of advice. But read up a lot before you start asking questions... like any other forum they don't like people who start asking a lot of others without doing their own leg work first.

 

na i took it off and threw it at somebody a while back and never put another one back on. was gonna get a shorty antenna but im too lazy lol

 

well here are some hdr pics I tried today in the afternoon. trying to figure everything out and see what I come up with. Gonna do these type of pics tonight and see what I get.

 

those don't look HDR?

 

from what I know they are, i took 3 different pics at 3 different levels, merged all 3, then used photomatix under the hdr options and then saved again in photoshop. unless i did something wrong but i dont know i followed some tutorial off of youtube

 

Just to be clear HDR should be used when there is too much dynamic range for a single shot to capture... your images are all during normal lighting with no really bright or dark areas, thus HDR is not really appropriate to use there... you already capture all the dynamic range with a normal shot.

When you want to HDR is when you have something so bright in shot it makes the rest of the shot darken out, or you have to expose so long the bright thing gets all blown out.

I can tell you processed it to be HDR by the way the colors are shifted (orangy and weird grays) but it wasn't really the right time as you probably gained very little from the bracketing.

This

http://www.yothemans.com/images/kekl...hdr%20copy.jpg

(while not the best picture) Is an appropriate time to use HDR. Light sources in the same shot as low light items like clouds and sides of buildings. Normally you would either end up with huge blown out light blooms or you wouldn't be able to see cloud and darker building/foliage detail. With HDR you get the best of both worlds.

So you did the process right... just not under the right conditions... good start though!

Here's some of my HDR stuff... it's not all "pure HDR" (in other words some of them are only single shots and sometimes I use HDR to get an effect, not necessarily to get dynamic range back, but it will give you some ideas where it can come in handy.

http://picasaweb.google.com/devedand...ey=CmunGOvgFkI

 

 

Broken rusty equipment is always a cool subject matter for HDR... not so wild about that subaru picture though... the effect has ruined the focus of the shot.

 

love the pics...it looks good