Exposure for night photography (from a noob)

[Konical]

Good Morning, Danilo,

This topic has appeared in a number of past discussions. If you do a Forum search, you'll find a great deal of information.

Konical

[medform-norm]

Perhaps you should buy a lightmeter that will meter very dark scenes as well, like a Gossen Lunasix 3s or a Profisix - these can be had for $100 on the used market, sometimes less. Walk around with this at night in the streets where you want to take a shot to get the hang of metering with these things.
We've got good results with this + Kodak Portra T film for color shots or Fuji Acros 100 ASA for B&W. We don't develop at home but at a simple lab, which doesn't do over- or underdeveloping - and we still end up with okay results.
When the scene is very dark, we sometimes have to expose for longer than 10 minutes! I have yet to get away with 3 minutes with no street lights on a 100ASA film.

As an afterthought, is there a booster available for your camera? We have one for our Canon F1, but don't know anything about Olympus gear.

[Danilo]

Soeren: Thanks for the deep explanation but I dont have light meter installed on my canon, I have only old external light meter, witch works only at day.
noseoil: Thanks, I will try t64 and 15sec - 2min exposure. I looked at your gallery, but images are closed for non APUG subscriber.
Andy K: Thanks for the book, will try to find it.
Frank B: Hey, I find this table very useful!
Poco: This is nice idea... Im trying to record every scene that I shooted, and compare with new ones.
Konical: Yes, you are probably right. I did some search first but I didnt find a thing, next time I will try better...
medform-norm: You are probably right, but I dont want to spend much money in the beginning. No I dont have a booster. It is realy simple thing.

Thanks again for your help. I did some experiments, and now Im waiting to develop. Will show finals when get to it

[Mike Kennedy]

I use a Black Cat Exposure Guide. You can get one on ebay for a few $$. Which ever method you employ don't forget the old photographers axiom:

"NOTATION,NOTATION,NOTATION"

Bring along a small note pad,pen and flashlight.

Mike

[Soeren]

BTW I wrote 4 stops from f/1.4 to f/8. That should offcource be five stops
Cheers Søren

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

Danilo, you also may want to try films who have a good resistance to reciprocity failure: TMX 100, Fuji Acros in B&W, and Fuji Provia 100 in colour slide can be exposed for a LONG time (think minutes) before you even have to compensate by a stop. Check the data sheets of these films on Kodak and Fuji's websites, or PM me and I'll email you the PDFs.

And don't forget to come back and show us your progress!

[Martin Liew]

Hello Danilo, it seems you got lotsa of technical advises here.

I do night photography too and I do also strongly recommend Andrew Sanderson's book, Night Photography. which you can purchase it easily over at Amazon.com.

Personally I shoot in B&W with my old Seagull-4 TLR using Kodak Tmax400 which is a pretty forgiving and versatile film for night shooting. After a few trials & errors, and based on Andrew's long exposure timing chart, I have came up with a fixed camera setting at f/16 & expose for 3min40s.

Below is one of the many night shots I did titled Lurking..., for yr reference and viewing pleasure:

Lurking...

A kind little advise: If you dun succeed in yr first few shots, go back on other nights to the same places and shoot again.

Have fun! Cheers mate!

[Soeren]

It took a little digging around to find it, but you may find this table useful. Other than that, I'd suggest you experiment, bracket like crazy, keep notes (so you know what you did when it does/doesn't work) and have lots of fun!

One other thing - If you're having neg film processed at a lab, bear in mind that the automatic printer may adjust your shots to make them look the way it thinks they should. As it's generally set up for holiday snaps, night shots may confuse it and result in over/under exposed prints. To avoid this "help" it would probably be worth having a word with the operator and seeing if he can turn off its automatic exposure compensation.

All the best,

Frank

Have you printed the table Frank linked to ? If not do it and use it.
In an old issue of Black & White Photography magazine there was an article about night photography also featuring an exposure table. Maybe some with that issue ( Ailsa ) and a scanner could print that one out too.
Regards Søren

[Andy K]

There are various tables in Andrew Sanderson's book, but I am reluctant to scan and post them in case it infringes copyright.

[noseoil]

Andy, again I'm in agreement with you (sigh) as I don't think the copying of intellectual property is a good idea in general.

Martin, nice example of a night shot in your posted image. One thing I've noticed in my night scenes is that a tighter aperture seems to give those hot light sources a bit more definition. I've done similar exposures with a light source in the frame and the best results seem to come from a small aperture. There is less "bleeding" of the light into other parts of the shot. This could be a function of the film I used and not the aperture, but I don't know. I do like the textures and composition in your shot. Very well done. tim