Example of Nighttime Photos at WDW

[DDreneeT]

I have a canon sureshot with a small zoom-plain and simple 35mm cameral. I don't have the ability to change anything on it except film. Should I get 800 speed for the fireworks and not use a flash? And I got 400 speed to use outdoor and indoors for everything else-I heard 400 was good to use inside but it will work good outside too, won't it?

DDreneeT@dalejr.net

 

[allicat]

Beautiful pictures! I have so much trouble with night shots! I have a Sony cybershot with 4.0 MP. Whenever I try my night shots at MK, for instance, if i have my daughter stand in front of the castle, she comes out fine but the castle is black.
In all honesty, I dont know how to change any of the settings on this camera.

 

[Geoff_M]

DDreneeT,

No you don't need 800 speed film. In fact, 200 speed should work just fine. The light emitted by fireworks is very bright and is sufficient to record on film as long as you aren't a long ways off. Also, the slower the film, the longer the exposure time your camera's meter will select. With fireworks you DON'T want a fast shutter speed. You want a 1/2 second or so exposure to allow for the firework to move through the air and create the "spoke" effect. Too fast, and many fireworks will look like a ball of expanding "dots". Put too slow a speed and all you'll get is a big fuzzy ball of light. If you have a good 35mm camera with a decent lens (the "f" number on the lens will be f4.0 or less), then 100 speed will will do just nicely. Be prepared for a lot of "throw-away" frames, but you'll have enough keepers in the bunch to make up for it.

Also keep in mind that with the long exposure time, you'll need to hold the camera as still as possible. You can't hand-hold it. As I've said... use lamp posts, trash can tops, fence railing, pocket tripods, etc. to press your camera against to steady it.


allicat,

If you don't know how to change the settings on the camera then there isn't much you can do without learning to do so. There's a couple parts to your problem:
1) There's distance between your daughter and the castle. As light travels from your flash, it decreases in strength by the "square of the distance". If your daughter is 10 feet away and the castle is 20 feet away, then the light that makes it to the castle is only 1/2 as bright as the light that hits your kid. If the castle is 40 feet away, then the light reaching it is only 1/4 as bright. etc. If you're trying to light up the kid and the castle at the same time with your flash, it's a "no win" situation. Either there'll be enough light hitting your child (and the castle won't get enough... and be dark), or the castle (and your daughter will be overexposed with too much light), but not both at the same time.

2) Most on-camera flashes only have a range of up to 15 feet, or less.

So what can you do?

1) Look in your manual and see if camera has an "auto fill" flash feature. "Auto fill" meters the exposure for a scene as if you weren't using a flash, and then fires the flash so it emits enough light to "help" the natural light in the scene. If your camera is smart enough it will even know the distance the lens is focused at and "kick out" enough light to properly illuminate an object at that distance. This feature is also useful in sunlight to eliminate shadows under the bills of hats or in eye sockets.

2) Use higher speed film, turn off the camera's flash, and try and get your daughter and the castle in natural light that's about the same brightness.

 

[allicat]

Thanks Geoff for your advice. My camera has all kinds of settings(white balance,spot meter, ISO) just to name a few. Im sure fill flash is probably on there somewhere.
Do I have any clue as to what these are? No! Will I be reading the manual? Yes! Im tired of my night pictures coming out ruined.
Just when I had a grasp on the 35 mm camera, we switched to digital!

 

[Geoff_M]

Not all light is the same color. When you look at someone with a blue shirt on inside your house and then outdoors, it basically looks like the same color to your eyes. But in fact sunlight has a "blue" cast to it (called "cooler") and interior house lighting is "redder" (called "warmer"). But our brain adjusts the data coming from our eyes to make the colors look the same. I won't bore you with the details, but this characteristic of the light is called "color temperature".

If you've ever used slide film in your camera, you have to know what lighting you'll be shooting in. Slide film comes in to "flavors": Daylight, and Tungsten. Daylight film is made to correctly record the color temperature of sunlight and Tungsten is made to use with indoor lighting. Use the wrong one in the wrong situation and your slides will look very green or red.
With negative print film, this isn't a problem. When the lab makes your prints they use colored filters with the enlarger light to correct the color of the print.

Digital cameras work like slide film, you have to tell your camera what kind of lighting you shooting in so it can make the colors look right.... So a blue shirt will still look blue. "White Balance" is the name of that setting. It gets that name partly because on many cameras you can "manually" set the color temperature by pressing the "set" button while pointing the camera at a white wall, white sheet of paper, or similar object. The camera then uses that object as a reference to adjust the way it interprets all the colors it sees until you change the White Balance again.

Most digital cameras also have an "auto" white balance setting that works well about 85% of the time. But sometimes you can have odd situations with mixed sources of light, in those cases it's best to manually set the balance.

Spot Meter... Most camera use what's called "center weighted" metering to determine the correct exposure of a photo. It assumes that most people put the thing they want to take a picture of in the center of the image. With Center Weighting, the meter basically looks at the brightness contained within a circle centered in the frame that takes up about 60% of the whole frame area (this number depends on the camera). But there are certain times when you don't want to use Center Weighted metering. Namely when your subject's brightness differs a lot from the area around the subject. For example you may want to take a photo of someone against a white wall and the subject only takes up about 10% of the photo. With center weighting, the camera meter will "see" all that white.

The way a auto exposure meter works is to try and average out the exposure so the resulting image will be what's called "18% gray". That's becuase in an "average" photo, if all the colors were fingerpaints and you mixed them all together, then the shade of gray you would get be 18% of the way between pure white and pure black. These meters work great as long as the image you're taking isn't too white or too black. This is why snow photos often come out looking gray.

Back to our example... So with center weighting, the meter will see too much white and will use an exposure that will darken the person too much. But putting the meter on "spot" drastically narrows the circle to 5% or less of the image. So you'd want to put the meter on "spot" and put your subject dead center in the frame and use that exposure setting to make sure your subject is exposed properly.

ISO... It's the "speed" of the sensor. Each time you double the ISO, it takes 1/2 the light to properly exposure the image. You do pay a price with higher ISO. In film, higher ISO means more "grain" in the photo... In digital, higher ISO means more "noise" (sorta like grain) in the image.

 

[forgetyourtroubles!]

I got some "Okay" pics, but you have to deal with movement, nice for fireworks, bad for parade.
With flash off, you can see all the little lights and the shape they are in but its hard to make out the image as a whole. With flash on, it seems like I got "hot spots" and a weird background.
Has anyone successfully photo'd this parade?
Thanks!

 

[Geoff_M]

Flash with Spectro would be a tough thing to make work. So that leaves available light as the only option. I've done some blur stuff with Spectro that looks good, but it's hit-n-miss. If you have digital and you can take your camera off of auto exposure mode, I'd try to manually use a shutter speed that's fast enough to hand-hold the camera. This is an opposite of the situation in my last post. You have lots of small areas of light surrounded by large amounts of darkness. The center-weighted meter wants to average the scene out and make it 18% gray. So you could probably bump the shutter speed up faster than the meter recommends and you would get black backgrounds and lit lights. You can use the LCD on the digital to tweak things until you get the desired results. If you're shooting conventional 35mm then it's a guessing game until you can get a test roll back and look at the results.

 

[iNTeNSeBLue98]

I stumbled upon this thread looking for info on Trail End. Those photos are incredible! I'm saving this for future reference. Thank you for sharing Geoff_M.

 

[madcoco]

Thanks a bunch for the tips! We usually have to delete 3/4 of our nightime shots due to them being blury.

 

[GAIL HAYDEN]

Sure wish you lived closer, then maybe I would figure out my Nikon 5000. I have the 950 also and absolutely love it. Why I ever bought the other one is WAY beyond me.