Night Shot

[Saldo1981]

Okay here I got this night shot here but I was wondering what could I do just short of bringing in external lights (not supposed to park there) to brighten up the car without over exposing the rest of the picture.

[Elsinore]

Maybe use flash, but drag it so the final exposure includes ambient light from the rest of the scene, but the flash illuminates the car in the foreground? What are the lights around the car in the picture above?

[staplermofo]

It looks like if you stood more to the right (preferably with the tree out of the shot, or at least the white buildings) you’d have a darker background. I guess if that was an option you’d’ve already thought of it though. hmm.

Maybe park it closer to the lights in front of it so they hit it harder?

Throw a baseball cap over the light on the tree?

[Saldo1981]

The lights are just a circle at the end of a road. You’re not supposed to drive inbetween them but who listens to that anyways. I never thought of throwing a hat over the tree’s light. I guess I’ll just have to go back over there with my buddy and his car to try a few more shots. I guess we can always go at 2am when nobody will be around now that the weather is getting chilly. I’ll have to try a few with the flash and double check and make sure that I’ve got the angle with the darkest background.

[anneb]

I agree with staplermofo– move so that the tree’s located elsewhere if you can. If you illuminated the car, you’ll run the risk of the picture looking like the tree is growing out of the seat!

How I got taught to tackle funky situations like this: set your aperture for what your flash wants the Aperture set to in manual mode, given your distance from the car. Set your shutter speed for exposing the picture, pretending you haven’t got any flash, or possibly any of those lights shining on the car. Then set the camera to those settings on manual, and shoot with your flash. I haven’t done this that often, since I find fiddling with flash details sometimes kind of overwhelming- I’m lousy at judging distance, and juggling pencil and paper when and it’s dark out! But the few times I’ve fought with it, I’ve been moderately happy with the outcome.

(My speedlight has a page on how to calculate aperture for the flash, in the “manual mode” section, but I’ve only ever done this with my older, non-variable-output flash, with the nice cheater-table printed on the back.)

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