Tel-Aviv by night

[Ike Harel]

Pink hour pictures of Tel-Aviv illuminated towers, view from Givatayim highest hill due west.

When processed, did not change the colors, hue’s nor touched the saturation value – left as is upon PP on Canon-DPP.

Picture date: Oct. 27th, 2017, at 18:21 local.
RAW, F9.0, 1/5 sec., ISO800, 55mm, cropped a bit from both the upper and lower parts. Used a tripod.

Ike

[Shadowman]

Nice, has a poster like effect. A bit noisy in the sky and would be quite interesting if some of the shadows could be lifted.

[Ike Harel]

Nice, has a poster like effect. A bit noisy in the sky and would be quite interesting if some of the shadows could be lifted.

Thanks John, have a four minutes earlier picture with brighter tones and a bit less noise affecting the sky - but I liked the later one better.
Ike


Here it is:

[DanK]

Ike,

My suggestion is to keep the ISO as low as possible in night photography, using longer exposures to compensate. As long as you don't expose to the left, you can get very smooth, low-noise images that way. Assuming that nothing is moving that would make a long exposure problematic, the one limitation is that particularly in a hot environment (Tel Aviv in the summer!), a very long exposure can cause the sensor to overheat, which will ruin the image. However, depending on the camera, you can go quite long without having that problem. In this image, you only need three stops to get down to ISO 100, which is the base on my cameras, and you were only at 1/5 second. I routinely go to 20 seconds or more for urban night photography and 5-10 minutes for shots out in the wilds.

In this image, you have taken up the full dynamic range of the camera, so ETTR is not an issue. However, in night photography that doesn't take up the whole dynamic range, you will sometimes get noticeably less noise if you expose all the way to the right and then darken the image to taste in postprocessing, rather than shooting it dark to begin with.

Dan

[Ike Harel]

Ike,

My suggestion is to keep the ISO as low as possible in night photography, using longer exposures to compensate. As long as you don't expose to the left, you can get very smooth, low-noise images that way. Assuming that nothing is moving that would make a long exposure problematic, the one limitation is that particularly in a hot environment (Tel Aviv in the summer!), a very long exposure can cause the sensor to overheat, which will ruin the image. However, depending on the camera, you can go quite long without having that problem. In this image, you only need three stops to get down to ISO 100, which is the base on my cameras, and you were only at 1/5 second. I routinely go to 20 seconds or more for urban night photography and 5-10 minutes for shots out in the wilds.

In this image, you have taken up the full dynamic range of the camera, so ETTR is not an issue. However, in night photography that doesn't take up the whole dynamic range, you will sometimes get noticeably less noise if you expose all the way to the right and then darken the image to taste in postprocessing, rather than shooting it dark to begin with.

Dan

Thanks Dan,
I know the ISO issue, by default my camera always on ISO100, but not in such a case - I wanted to get the colors as natural as possible, and not playing with post-processing. See my next picture at ISO 1600.
Ike

[george013]

It's a very small image, a post stamp of 700x395pixels. I don't see any noise on it in this format.

George

[DanK]

Thanks Dan,
I know the ISO issue, by default my camera always on ISO100, but not in such a case - I wanted to get the colors as natural as possible, and not playing with post-processing. See my next picture at ISO 1600.
Ike

increasing ISO and shortening the shutter speed will not make the colors more natural. The only effect on colors, which you probably won't notice, would be to reduce bit depth.

You are shooting raw, so colors will be a function of how you choose to render the image. One initial decision is what profile to use to give you the initial rendering of colors. Some manufacturer's software will read the exif and apply the rendering that would have been used to create a jpeg with whatever picture style you have chosen. Other software, like Lightroom, forces you to choose an initial rendering, but it has a default that it will apply if you don't tell it to do otherwise ("Adobe standard" until recently, now "Adobe color"). ISO setting has no effect on any of this. (I used Adobe standard for years, but I am now leaning toward creating my own camera profiles to use instead.)

This is a bit off topic, but for many people (including me), the biggest color issue for sunset photos is white balance. As your brain adjusts its perception of white as color changes, it isn't always obvious, at least to me, what white balance will provide a "natural" look. For what it's worth, I often set my camera to a fixed color temperature when I am doing sunset and night photography and figure out what will look "natural" in postprocessing. I find I do end up tweaking white balance a lot in urban night photography because of the strong color casts of some artificial lighting, particularly sodium vapor lamps.

As an illustration, I'll post below a night photograph I took some years ago, when I was first experimenting with night photography. In this case, I upped the ISO to 200, although if I were doing it over, I don't think I would do that. The exposure was 10 minutes, using a Canon 50D, which is a pretty noisy camera. If I recall, there is no noise reduction other than long-exposure noise reduction, which takes a black from afterwards and subtracts any bright pixels. I entered this in a small competition, and the judge, who was an experienced night photographer, immediately identified the color cast. He said that it was sodium vapor lamps reflecting off the heavy cloud cover. I hadn't thought about it, but 11 km away, across a lake that was virtually entirely free of artificial light, there was a tiny village with several sodium vapor street lights.

[Ike Harel]

All I said Dan, I left the automatic ISO intact, did not increase its value.
I appreciate the prolonged explanation.
Ike