Well i tried shooting night photography for the first time last night. The pictures looked awesome on my camera...but when i put them on my computer. they looked like shit. Ill post a couple pictures and if JSP could give me some feed back and tips that would be awesome
My biggest problem was getting the picture in focus. I couldnt get it focused on infinity :/
please help All photos were taken after 11:00 PM






This post was edited by tghavockid on Oct 18 2012 09:43am

Did you try manual focus? In low light most cameras have a hard time get a good focus point

I was in manuel focus for each shot. I couldnt look through and focus on something cause everything was so dark

the sky part in those photos look nice, all the objects what is under that seems blurry to me,
mby overexposured or your tripod moved when you took the picture.
The red / orange part tend to burn out so that makes is even worse, fix the WB and for preventing tripod to move i myself use cheap "unisex" remote.
maybe longer shutterspeed at more closed F . im sry im too lazy atm to check exif xd so someone will correc me if im wrong ^^

And while you play around wih F and shutterspeed, you can also try "starry" effect without any filters to help you.

thank you

Max aperature, white balance, etc.

Pretty much what everyone else said. lol

I find some lenses are easier to focus in the dark than others. For example, my 50mm craptacular one sucks at autofocusing in the dark, when my sigma 10-20mm works pretty good in the dark. Could have been a coincidence, who knows, I didn't look much into it lol.

Usually I try to do my best by focusing on something in the distance whether it be a tiny light or star or edge or shadow. Or sometimes I will take a picture, and then view it in my view finder, and zoom in like crazy to see the detail and see how clear it turned out. I know those small images on the screen look so good till you upload them - sometimes it's a huge disappointment. And of course manual focus is most likely needed in a lot of very dark situations. But trying to find something simple in the distance to get your focus right is usually the winner for me.

i will deff. try this next time

Show us your next tries!

I haven't done a night photo in a long time, you are inspiring me!