Canon digital rebel night shots

[jncvh]

I am just getting use to using the manual settings on my rebel and was wondering what everyone was using for their settings for shooting at night. Of course I am using a tri-pod and try to use ISO 100 but what are you using for manual settings? I don't like to use flash to much unless there is something I want to light up but like to do photos of fireworks, airplanes, or landscape.

 

[pxlbarrel]

For night shots, I cranked the ISO up to 800 and even 1600. I wanted a higher depth of field without having to have the shutter open for a few seconds than I would have gotten at ISO 100. If possible, I wanted an f-stop of at least 11 in my shots.

The truth is, I did a lot of experimenting and ended up deleting a lot of photos that I didn't like until I found the right combination. When the meter said my camera was set up for the light conditions, I actually changed the f-stop to let in less light...because I was finding that for the "correct light conditions", my sky wasn't dark enough...it was dark blue and not black. (too much lighting in the area I guess.) Don't know if that makes sense or not.

 

[PaulD]

That's a big question. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. The meter in the camera is going to want to set the exposure to make the scene look like daylight. So if you want it to still look like nighttime (like pxlbarrel) then you need to step the exposure down a bit.

Night shots can be very difficult to meter since there are generally lots of lights that tend to fool your meter. Multiple light sources cause the scene to have high contrast which sometimes means that you have to make decisions about what part of the scene you're interested in capturing. You really need to know how your camera's meter works. I do a lot of nighttime photography at work and what I train people to do is to find something in their scene that they want to be a mid tone in their final exposure, zoom in on it (or use spot metering if you have it), meter, then recompose and take the shot. Before taking the shot you can make exposure adjustments to achieve the result you're looking for.

Of course, now that everyone uses digital, it's fairly easy to review your photo and evaluate the exposure using the histogram.

The bottom line is that there's no one setting that works every time. Here's an article one I found that looks pretty good: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-metering.htm. Remember, that there's nothing fundamentally different about metering for nighttime vs daytime other than the shutter speeds will be much longer.

Good luck and have fun! I think nighttime photography is one of the cooler things you can do with your camera and is totally worth the extra time and effort it takes.