Long exposures for night photos

[jryser]

Bought the whole thing. Interestingly my first bird just lost an engine and got a thorough soaking. So it's fixable and I will use it as a backup.


Sent from my PT beating heart

 

[iJeff]

So I'm about to try my Phantom3 professional on a skyline photo at night. I've heard tales of the P3 being capable of actually taking exposures like this as long as 6 seconds, which darn-near requires a tripod. Any of you have experience with success here, and is it necessary to push the ISO ASA all the way up into the noisy range to get a good night still photo, or is this possible at 200 or so? Any tips are appreciated.

For night shots, I will limit the ISO to 200 (400 max) so that there is less noise. Aperture is fixed at F2.8 which you cannot change. Shutter speed will vary from 1 to 3 seconds depending on the lighting. To prevent any blurry photos, I will try to limit the shutter speed to 3 seconds and take multiple shots. I will also turn off the red LED light of the two front arms as otherwise, you will see some red patches in your photos due to long exposure.

Below are some night shots that I have taken in JPEG:


ISO 200, 3 sec


ISO 200, 3 sec


ISO 200, 1.3 sec


ISO 200, 1.3 sec


ISO 200, 2 sec

 

[MattyDread]

Nice pics - we tried to get into the infinity pool on the 1st pic, the one on top of the 3 towers. Fail

 

[Mordor]

lololol....great photos.....gorgeous info!

Tks!

 

[zryall3]

Thanks for all the tips folks. I took the P3 out on a semi-windy night aloft and shot this 1.5 second , ASA 100 exposure of the Austin skyline as it was getting dark. Totally agree that the best shots are while there is still some ambient light and not dark-dark yet. Then you massage the look of the shot with your EV dial for the proper affect. Pretty darn sharp.

 

[zryall3]

Here is a sunset pano from Sat. night, 3 panels, 3 exposures per panel, 1/10 was fastest exposure:

Laguna Niguel sunset pano by Alan Smallbone, on Flickr

Cool. What software are you using to put your panels together with? Photoshop doesn't do that out of the box does it?

 

[SteelGator]

Cool. What software are you using to put your panels together with? Photoshop doesn't do that out of the box does it?

Not sure what he is using, but both Photoshop and Lightroom will do panoramas. It is under the merge command. It will then ask how you want to combine, you can do HDR or stitch together.

 

[Meta4]

Cool. What software are you using to put your panels together with? Photoshop doesn't do that out of the box does it?

There isn't much that Photoshop doesn't do. There's so much in ther.
To stitch in Photoshop .. go to File .. Automate .. Photomerge

 

[apsphoto]

Cool. What software are you using to put your panels together with? Photoshop doesn't do that out of the box does it?

Thanks and glad you like the pano. Photoshop and Lightroom will stitch images but there can be lots of issues. I use Ptgui Pro, it does the hdr blending, for this I used the Fusion blending which I think is the most realistic looking. It is very configurable, it also has a lot of features that I use besides the panos from my P3. I do a lot of panos and immersive panos for customers and nothing stitches as well as Ptgui. It will also output a layered photoshop file with masks if you want to fine tune the blending by hand. I am a long time user of it. There are lots of programs out there that will work, that is just my choice.

Alan

 

[Ottawa Aerials]

Here's the adjustment for exposure time.
It's labeled Shutter - how long the shutter is open.

But if it's all new to you, the Phantom will give you pretty good results in auto.
This was shot in plain vanilla auto ...

In auto but how much post work was done. Great post work if so I just have no idea how to use photo shop. Is there a lot that goes into touching up or just some tweaking?

 

[Meta4]

In auto but how much post work was done. Great post work if so I just have no idea how to use photo shop. Is there a lot that goes into touching up or just some tweaking?

The night photography of cityscapes just looks good straight from the camera and there's very little tweaking required. Much less than daytime shots in general.

 

[Ottawa Aerials]

The night photography of cityscapes just looks good straight from the camera and there's very little tweaking required. Much less than daytime shots in general.

Very nice. Can't wait to go take some night pics I assumed they wouldn't turn out. Glad I'm on this forum now I know. Great pics man

 

[wardchris22]

Here's the adjustment for exposure time.
It's labeled Shutter - how long the shutter is open.

But if it's all new to you, the Phantom will give you pretty good results in auto.
This was shot in plain vanilla auto ...

That looks like beautiful Brisbane to me. Great shot!

 

[jryser]

Indiana Sunset! West and East!

Sent from my PT beating heart

 

[jephoto]

In regard to stitching Panos- Photoshop & Lightroom do a great job on simple stitches - as in camera more or less level. If trying multiple rows where some frames are tipped down a lot- lots of parallax distortion- a stitching software like PTGui can do a better job.
I used to use that one to do 360vr stitches. It can handle it.
But for single row 2-4 frames PS & LR do a fine job. Just overlap a lot. I do approx 50% overlap.

 

[savall21]

Love these shots.

Subscribing.

 

[Philip Ruiz]

How do you get it to take long exposure pictures?

 

[Philip Ruiz]

Forgot to turn my red lights off lol. This was just point and click in auto mode. I want to learn to take long exposure pics.

 

[TeddyXanzibar]

this thread was very informative and helped me take some beautiful shots this evening, thank you all!

 

[AlmostTan]

this thread was very informative and helped me take some beautiful shots this evening, thank you all!

Let's see them!