Some of the best views come from tall buildings that have observatories surrounded by glass. I created this video below to show you how-press play and watch:Īt some point, every cityscape photographer is going to be faced with the challenge of shooting through glass. Now we can layer the light trail exposures into our base exposure very easily in Photoshop. The 6 light trail exposures used to create the above image In the end, you may end up with a handful of ideal exposures. Now take as many shots as you wish, but time the shots well so that you capture as many light trails as possible. Try to create a shutter speed of around 25-30 seconds. We can do this by using a smaller aperture (creating a larger F value). This will allow us to capture long, sweeping light trails. Next, we need to extend our shutter speed. They’re also very easy to capture and process.įirst, shoot the scene as you would normally, trying to capture a sharp image, but without thinking about the car trails. Light trails add a wonderful dimension to your images.
Then simply rotate the focus ring until you’re happy. Here’s a quick tutorial to show you how to fine tune image sharpness using Live View.Ĥ. Instead, switch to Live View and use the magnifying glass buttons to zoom into your area of focus. While this is possible, it’s extremely difficult if your point of focus is far away.
And, when light begins to fade, auto-focus becomes significantly less effective.īeginners to photography often think that manual focus relies on looking through the viewfinder while focusing. Manual focus will always produce consistently sharper images than auto-focus. But, for those of us who can take our time and don’t need to worry about capturing fast moving objects, manual focus is king.
The improvement in speed and sharpness of auto-focus in most modern lenses is incredible. Finally, I used the brighter exposure to bring some gentle details back into the foreground. It’s important not to darken them too much, as they are an important element in any night cityscape that can add beautiful energy to your scene. Note that the lights are still bright in the final image. I used two lower exposures to control the blown out lights. The city lights in the base exposure were mostly over exposed, while the trees in the foreground were far too dark.
See this link for a luminosity mask tutorial on exposure blending. You can also download my free luminosity mask actions. To create the sharpest, cleanest image, I highly recommend you blend the exposures using luminosity masks. If you’re new to bracketing, type the name of your camera and ‘Auto-Bracketing’ in Google to check if your camera has an auto-bracketing capability (where the camera does it for you).įinal image after blending exposures with luminosity masksįor this image, I took 7 different exposures, but I only chose to use 4. Taking multiple exposures is known as bracketing. Otherwise, with a single exposure, you may end up with heavily under/over exposed areas. In order to create a balanced image, it is sometimes necessary to take multiple exposures of the same scene. Our cameras aren’t capable of capturing scenes of such high contrast. There’s often a large difference between the brightest and darkest areas of our images. Bracket exposures to overcome scenes of strong contrastĬityscapes can have an extremely wide dynamic range of light due to artificial lighting, more so than landscapes. All of this will equal a sharper, cleaner image.Ģ.
But in AP, we can manually keep ISO low, maintain an optimum aperture, and extend our shutter speeds to compensate for the low light. For example, in lower light situations Auto mode will boost ISO significantly, while keeping the shutter speed low, leaving our images with masses of noise. The advantages of this over shooting in Auto are huge. Basically, we can control everything in-camera, apart from the shutter speed. Aperture Priority offers the easiest solution to your cityscape needs. The two main modes for any photographer are Aperture Priority (AP) and Manual. Here are a few tips on shooting and processing cityscape night photography images that I’d like to share with you.Īs we advance as photographers, it is essential that we explore the various shooting modes our cameras offer. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of shooting some of the finest cities in South America, the United States, Europe, and Asia. We can capture such a diverse range of scenes and moods.
There’s nothing quite like the energy and buzz of a large city. A Golden Hong Kong Morning by Jimmy Mcintyre on 500px