The tower here is (was?) lit up in honor of the '09 graduating class. Went to get some pictures of it, but didn't end up with anything I really liked. I got three that I thought were decent:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadcactus/3566417606/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadcactus/3566415654/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadcactus/3566416904/

I got this one, which I really liked but was botched by glare.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v642/deadcactus/?action=view&current=IMG_1087.jpg

Any way to edit out the glare? More importantly, how do you prevent it? And what's that white spot toward the middle?

I had a lot of noise in all of them. I'm thinking the lesson there is that when shooting a static scene at night with a tripod, I should have set the ISO to 100 and either accepted the longer exposure times or dropped the aperture and accepted a lower depth of field. Correct?

Thanks all.

 

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I can't help with your questions as I have no night shooting experience yet, but I just wanted to say that I love that second one

 

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Hokay, lots of questions. I'll try to deal with them one at a time.


Any way to edit out the glare?

Probably several, but I suck at photoshop, so I can't help you there.


How to avoid it?

Don't shoot directly into the light, the glare makes "stars" like that based on how many blades your aperture has, more blades = more "arms" on the star, and it will happen if you shoot directly into light, it's physics I'm afraid

You can reduce the effect by using a smaller aperture.


I've noticed you're using f/22 and well... to put it quite frankly that is overkill. You're reducing the quality of your image, by reduducing sharpness, and adding defracton (as well as those star glares, when shooting into light)


You should be able to get the desired results using f/8 or f/11 and certainly no more then f/16.


Remember that most lenses are at their sharpest 1-2 stops from full open, and deteriorate after that.


The white spot can be many diffrent things.

1. Dust on your sensor/lens. Stop down to a small aperture and shoot at something gray, and it should show up. if this happens with multiple lenses, its the sensor, if it happens only on one lens, its the lens.

2. Raindrop on your lens.


When shooting at night, with a tripod you adjust your shutterspeed to compansate for lack of light. If you're shooting handheld you compansate with higher ISO values.

 

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The white spot in the tree should be easy to get rid of with the healing brush in Photoshop. The long blue streak at the top right of the building would be easy to get rid of since it's surrounded by black, just paint black over it. And the discolored spot on the right of the building half-way up would be a little touchier to fix, but you could carefully clone the color from the surrounding parts of the building.

I like the star effect you got from the streetlight.

 

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Thanks for the help, everyone.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadcactus/3568443180/

 

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Nice job of cleaning it up.

 

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Really nice job. That's a beautiful pic now.

 

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