Question for night photography!

[alexis88]

I visited Disneyland a couple of weeks ago and I was trying to shoot a picture of a friend of mine late in the afternoon in front of the Cinderella's castle, which was all shiny and stuff!
But no matter what i did, either my friend was dark and I could see the background, or the background was totally blured and my friend was ok!
I tried with large numbers of F as well and flash, but it also didnt work...!
I hope I made clear what I mean...! Any suggestions??

[Shadowman]

I visited Disneyland a couple of weeks ago and I was trying to shoot a picture of a friend of mine late in the afternoon in front of the Cinderella's castle, which was all shiny and stuff!
But no matter what i did, either my friend was dark and I could see the background, or the background was totally blured and my friend was ok!
I tried with large numbers of F as well and flash, but it also didnt work...!
I hope I made clear what I mean...! Any suggestions??

Hi Alexandros,

Photo examples would help, along with exif data.

[Manfred M]

Without seeing any images, I'm just guessing. If you photographed your friend in front of a brightly lit object, you are essentially in a back-lit situation and the camera would expose the total scene to the standard 18% gray, meaning that your poorly lit friend would be terribly underexposed. The flip side is that if you expose your friend correctly, the background would blow out (i.e. be too light).

The solution would be to use flash; set the camera to properly expose the background and then have the flash expose your friend correctly. The main issue here is that your flash needs to be powerful enough to illuminate your friend properly.

[lukaswerth]

Another possibility would be some sort of exposure stack, HDR or perhaps using Enfuse (something I tend to prefer sometimes). In this way the exposure of your friend might be more pleasing as with a flash.

Lukas

[inkista]

I visited Disneyland a couple of weeks ago and I was trying to shoot a picture of a friend of mine late in the afternoon in front of the Cinderella's castle, which was all shiny and stuff!
But no matter what i did, either my friend was dark and I could see the background, or the background was totally blurred and my friend was ok!

This means the scene had a larger dynamic range than your camera can handle. But you could have fixed the second problem (background was totally blurred) by not handholding the camera, but putting it on a tripod/gorillapod/bench railing. When your friend was lit by flash, she's correctly exposed, but the background can't be lit by the flash, so its exposure depends upon the shutter speed to "burn in" the exposure. In lower light, to get enough light, that means a longer shutter speed, so the background can get blurred if the shutter speed goes lower than you can safely handhold.

At Disneyland, there are a lot of useful posts, rails, fences, benches, etc. that you can use to support a camera even if you don't have a tripod, but a full-sized tripod gives you more choice for framing. I tend to bring one, stick it in a locker all day, and then haul it out as it gets darker for all the lights and fireworks and shows like Fantasmic! But if you're traveling light with a P&S, even a fence rail or tiny cheap plastic travel tripod can be useful for this stuff.

Nice bonus is you can stick yourself in the shot, too, if you use a tripod and a timer.

[jcuknz]

I have the on-board flash set to minus one stop and the camera left to itself is wonderful in sorting it out for me within the parameters that can be tweaked in editing. I suspect that if I had your camera file I would be able to adjust it to show both freind and disneyland properly. Camera and editor are companion tools to a greater degree than camera and darkroom were and need to be practiced together.

[William W]

. . . shoot a picture late in the afternoon in front of the Cinderella's castle, which was all shiny and stuff!
But no matter what i did, either my friend was dark and I could see the background, or the background was totally blured and my friend was ok!
I tried with large numbers of F as well and flash, but it also didnt work...!
I hope I made clear what I mean...! Any suggestions??

Your question is quite clear to me.

No possible precise answer can be given without the answers to the following questions:

• What camera?
• What Flash?
• What was the Shooting Distance? (Camera to Subject Distance)

Notwithstanding those answers which are required, an example image with EXIF (as previously requested) would be helpful also.

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The solution would be to use flash; set the camera to properly expose the background and then have the flash expose your friend correctly. The main issue here is that your flash needs to be powerful enough to illuminate your friend properly.

I agree.

As a general answer:

Make an ambient reading of the BACKGROUND and use that as your exposure setting a shutter speed of 1/125s~1/15s and a middle aperture (typically about F/8 on a 135 or APS-C Format Digital Camera) and make the ISO to suit.

Set the HOT SHOE Flash on AUTO and dial in FEC -0.5 to -1EV for Caucasian People and/or very light coloured dress and -1.0 to -1.5 EV for Dark Skinned People and or Dark Clothes.

The FEC (Flash Exposure Compensation) will vary depending upon your Flash Unit and your Camera.

IF you are using the camera's built in Pop Up Flash, then that is a different story: you will need to be within about 1~2 meters Shooting Distance to typically use Flash as Fill, for most DSLRs and P&S cameras and their on-board flash units.

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The techniques described are referred to as "Flash as Fill" (in daylight) and "Dragging the Shutter" - there is much information and misinformation available on the internet about these topics.

*

High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDR) is not usually a technique suitable for Portraiture, as the Subject is rarely still enough even for tow images to be shot, unless they are constricted tightly or (unfortunately) deceased.


WW