advice on taking after dark photo's please.

[dogwalker]

Our next trip to Florida will be our fifth and this time I have refused to walk around with a video camera glued to my eye.
I have recently purchased a Konica/Minolta DiMage Z3 Digital camera with a 12x optical zoom and so far I'm very pleased with it.
I'm wondering what are the best settings to use for those night time shots in the parks - Spectromagic, fireworks etc.
The camera has several program settings such as twilight, sunsets, sports & so on. Do I need to use flash or does it wash the colours out?.
Also I can change the ISO setting, I believe if this is set to 400 it gives better low light pictures. Is this a better option.
Or do I just leave it on auto and let it get on with it?.
Any advice greatly appreciated.

[brizzle]

Generally avoid ISO400, whilst you will get a faster shutter speed the noise in the picture will lose a lot of detail.
In fact I keep mine on ISO50 most, if not all, of the time.

For fireworks then a tripod is best but if not, like me, then I found that setting the Z3 to S Mode (shutter priority) and anything from 1/15th of a second - 1.5 seconds exposure and take loads and loads of photo's guessing when the shells will explode. The anti-shake will help but I find holding the neck strap taught against my neck helps to steady to camera too. I also sometimes carry a mini tripod which can be placed on bins etc... around the parks.

You might want to experiment and see if ISO400 is workable because if you reduce the size of the pictures then the detail may be acceptable.

I either use :

P mode : when I feel lazy and let the camera do it all but the ISO setting
S Mode : I choose the shutter speed
A Mode : I choose the aperture (small number for a good Depth of Field, think portrait with a blurry background or a high A number if you want all the detail, near and far, captured, think landscapes)

One thing I would say is *never* use the auto settings they aren't great on the Z3...

Another good thing is that the Z3 produces very good video for a still camera.
Invest in a 1Gb card before you go (about £50) and you will be able to take photo's and a few video clips each day.

Examples of night photo's below with a bit about the settings

Shutter = 1.6 seconds, Aperture F/2.8, ISO-50, Shutter Priority



Shutter = 1/2 second, Aperture F/2.8, ISO-100, +2 Exposure Compensation, Shutter Priority


Of course the old adage of take loads of photo's helps. I probably have a few shots of Spaceship Earth at night at slightly different exposures trying to get the right balance so it is still trial and error.
Don't know if that will help.

Brizzle.

[Nostromo]

I won't even attempt to get technical with experts like Snapper and Brizzle around, but you might find taking a monopod useful if you do not have the room for a tripod. Not as versatile as a tripod of course, but more portable and used with Minolta's anti-shake facility, can deliver quite good results for longish exposures of night photography.

[Snapper]

For things like the Spectromagic parade I would definitely try to photograph it with flash. There are a couple of reasons for this. The amount of light being thrown around by the parade is way way more than anything a small flashgun can produce. All the flash will do is give the camera's light metering system one more problem to solve when it is already under a tricky situation; so the results can be quite variable. The other thing that often goes wrong with flash is that the camera is trying to expose for the float, so it fires the flash and ends up doing a full-power flash trying to illuminate the floats. In the meantime the flash also catches the backs of heads standing in front of you and they all end up washed out and ghostly looking.

For fireworks by far the bes approach is to use a tripod. Even with image stabilised lenses you really can't hold a camera still for long night-time exposures. You can get some good results but you will always lose a bit of sharpness in the photo.

Fireworks can be very hit-and-miss, even if you do everything right, so the main thing to do is to shoot dozens and dozens of shots all through the display. If you get one good one for every 10 or 20 you take you are doing well.

Personally, for fireworks shots, I switch off everything automatic on the camera. The first thing to do then once it's on a tripod is focus it. I don't use autofocus for fireworks as I don't want the focus hunting backwards and forwards. Switch off the flash. Then start with maybe an exposure of 2 seconds at f/8 and see what you get.

There is a big difference photographing Wishes at Magic Kingdom and Illuminations at Epcot. Illuminations you get everything set and just snap snap snap away. Wishes is a killer because everything displays over the castle, and the castle keeps changing colour and light levels; so to make a good job of Wishes you have to keep one eye on the sky and one eye on the castle.

My Nikon has a function called long exposure noise reduction. It digitally removes noise (unwanted twinkles and sparkly pixels) from long night-time shots. If the Minolta has something similar I would have it switched on. The downside is that the camera's resources are tied up doing the image processing for up to a second or two after the photo is taken so it gets easy to fill the camera's internal memory buffer (before it writes the image to the flash card) and at that point you are stuck waiting for the hardware to catch up with you - and Murphey's law says that this is just exactly when a huge shell explodes and creates the best photo of the night.

It's very trial and error. Keep a close eye on the image preview you get after each shot. If they look over or under exposed tweak the exposure a little to compensate.

Happy snapping

[dogwalker]

Thanks for the advice folks. One good thing about digital camera's - you can click away happily and then discard the rubbish. I will have to get some practice in before we go (3 weeks and counting), now where can I find a firework display in February in the UK (LOL).

[Magical Dreams]

What Snapper & Brizzle don't know about photography ain't worth knowing!!

Take a look at their photo's on here!!

They amaze me with the detail!!

Ab Fab![beer]

[CERICROWLEY]

Hi Brizzle

I have been having problems taking action photos in the dark ie fireworks and shamu rocks america.

They come out terrible, blurred and sometimes the shot is delayed after pressing the shutter.

I have a sony dsc-p10 5.0mpixels.

Its like it trying to focus and I'm missing all the action.

Thanx

[Snapper]

It's probably doing just that Ceri. It's very hard for a camera (any camera) to autofocus at night as it doesn't have as much light to work with. So many autofocus cameras can 'hunt' for focus. You might also get this when subjects are moving quickly, like jumping dolphins or roller-coasters.

Most cameras have a focus-lock, if you gently press the shutter release button half-way the camera should focus and then lock the focus at whatever you were pointing it at. You will usually get a small beep or a light to show that the camera is happy. Keep the button pressed and you should be able to re-frame the shot and then snap it straight away. The camera won't try to re-focus as long as you keep your finger on the button.

At night you can use this to a big advantage by having the camera focus on something quite bright and well-lit, and then re-frame the shot without the need for the camera to re-focus on a dark area.

If the camera can't focus (maybe it's too dark) you will probably see a flashing or blinking light somewhere and get no beep.

The other reason for things being blurred at night is that there is just not enough light available to take the photo while you are holding the camera steady. It's called camera-shake. Your camera will probably warn you of it with a different flashing light. To try to get around this, whizz up the ISO setting if you can change it, or force the camera not to drop below a shutter speed of maybe 1/30 second if you have this function. You might find that doing the latter makes the photos quite dark, or very dark, but you can often correct this later with some image editing software. Another rule of thumb is to get the original image as good as possible. You can correct colours and lightness later, but can't correct focus and blurring.

[search66]

I wish I was a combo of Snapper and Brizzle.... I'd be called: "SNIZZLE"

[Snapper]

If you wish hard enough, sprinkle a little pixie dust and ask Blott nicely she can make this come true.

But then you would also be cursed with taking photos for the rest of your life and never being happy with them, except for that occasional one in a thousand that works out well. So be careful what you wish for ...