Ambient light

[aee]

How do you counter act the affect of ambient light when taking night photos

[xpatUSA]

How do you counteract the effect of ambient light when taking night photos

Awstin, could you clarify the question? I think of ambient as meaning "surrounding" as in, at night, it is dark. So that would be counteracted by a longer exposure time or a larger aperture. Which is so simple an answer that you could mean something different, I reckon.

Not unlike the analogy of "ambient" temperature e.g. at night the surrounding air is cool all around. Warm air caused by a nearby camp-fire would not, however, be at ambient temperature.

[aee]

I mean light from houses lamps etc wwhen taking pictures of the stars or other night shots

[Manfred M]

I mean light from houses lamps etc wwhen taking pictures of the stars or other night shots

You shoot from a location where these do not impact your image in a negative way. Nicely said, one gets far away from the "light pollution" from these sources. For me that means getting in the car and driving north for about 50 minutes. If I want total darkness, the drive will be around 2-1/2 hours (this would be to a designated "dark sky" area).

If I shoot north, east or west, I am fine as I'm in a very sparsely populated area. Shooting south would get me the glow of the city. If you live in a densely populated area, you might have to go much further afield.

http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/ works for North America, but you get the idea...

[DanK]

Exactly as Manfred said, which means that astrophotography is not practical for a lot of people.

To illustrate how powerful light pollution can be with long exposures, take a look at this:



I took this about 11 PM in the middle of the Adirondack mountains, on a cloudy night. The exposure was 10 minutes. You can vaguely see star trails through the clouds. The question is: what's the yellow glow? It was far too late at night for this to be light from the setting sun. A night photographer I know immediately figured it out: sodium vapor lamps. About 7 miles (12 km?) away, there is a very small village, population perhaps 200, that has a few sodium vapor street lamps. Standing where I was, you wouldn't notice. With a 10-minute exposure, you do. Admittedly, the effect would be much less on a clear night.

[Codebreaker]

Location is all important. I'm fortunate to live in a designated Dark Skies area. You can check for sites across the Uk from here....

http://www.darkskydiscovery.org.uk/d...sites/map.html

Colin

[Thlayle]

How do you counter act the affect of ambient light when taking night photos

Hi Awstin,

I do a lot of night shooting, and I will offer that the strategy for ambient light is not so much to counteract it but work with it.

The suggestions already given are great. Consider you location, direction, time of night and look for your best dark skies.

It can be very hard to find dark skies nowadays, even when you travel long distances for them. What I do sometimes is to take multiple shots at different exposure settings & combine the results in post-processing. Aside from that, I find that using Raw files and sticking to short exposures with high ISOs works well much of the time.

A lot of effort is put into using various light painting techniques to get a complete composition. I find I can get good results just using available light.

This image is a single frame with an ISO of 3200 at 25 seconds. Management of the farm & house lighting were done solely in post-processing:

[aee]

great feed back thanks. more to taking pictures than meets the eye