Any tips on night-time photography.

I love night photography

Lighting, light graffitti, etc etc all great fun!
I'm by no means particularly good or experienced but I strongly believe practice maks perfect.

I tend to go for as long an exposure as possible (30secs on my d50, without a remote for on and off clicking of bulb), so that the ISO can be kept as low as possible to reduce noise. Then I pic an aperture to get the correct light levels.
Sometimes I reduce the shutter speed if I don't want star trails, which can look a bit pants IMO.

Unfortunately, my current lens is a bit grubby, so I'm not doing much long exposure stuff as it tends to draw out the dust on the lens.
I've also not been having as much success with my current, second D50 as I did with my first, even though they are exactly the same camera! Weird.

I took hate using the flash, but this is simply because I don't understand/am no good at it if I'm honest.
In a similar vein, I don't really "do" post processing so all the below are as they came off the camera, apart from a bit of cropping.

Have some of mine...









Something I'm trying to master at the moment is using zoom on a long exposure, to create light trails from a fixed light source. This is the best I've got thus far, you can hopefully see what it's trying to achieve. I'm trying to get a good shot of the imp using this technique, as it's angel eye headlights would look awesome IMO

Some excellent advice in here. Photography + cars = Joey T happy!

Some from me:









No car in this one, but it was taken at Santa Pod though!



;D

I like messing with night photography, I have a canon EOS 400d but the longest exposure I seem to be able to do is 30secs? I want to take a pic of the capri with the night sky above blurring the stars together but need a much longer exposure - anyone know how?

I've'a 300D, and I know it has bulb, which it even displays the words for, its under M for Manual control.

I believe that is the only place it appears, as with Tv (Time priority, you select the shutter speed, camera works out the Aperture value) and with Av (Aperture priority, same as Tv but t'other way round) you'll find that it doesn't let you do bulb cause the camera cant work out what values it needs.

Here are my own... vague attempts.







And hey, why not, its got a car in it XD
Self portrait.

The above photo was a 15 second exposure at ISO100, F2.8. I used a flashgun, firing it manually 4 times during the exposure whilst walking around the car. I then did the same with the bonnet up and merged then (poorly!) in photoshop.

Another, which makes this ugly boring Rover (which in real life has poor paintwork and very curbed alloys) look not too shabby!

Your Panisonic FZ28 is a decent camera and can do up to 60 second exposures. Use full manual mode. I'd start off with ISO100 (as low as it goes to reduce image noise) and F2.8 (as open as the lens goes to let plenty of light in). Put the camera on a tripod or something hard and not wobbly and use the timer setting to set it off, otherwise pressing the shutter button shakes the camera. Use a decent bright torch to light up the car when you press shutter button so that the camera can see what it is trying to focus on. Park the car under a light or by a road or somewhere with interresting lighting and start off with say a 15 second exposure. Look at the results and go from there. If they are too dark increase the shutter time, If they are too bright reduce the shutter time or change the F number to a higher one.

You might also want to read up about RAW images. These are not processed into jepg format by the camera. Instead you do it on the computer. The main advantage of this in this case is you can adjust the white balance to remove odd colouring easily, without loosing image quality. You camera has a RAW mode, and you should have some software supplied with the camera to process them.

Hope that helps!

It's a normal thing with bulb mode on cameras, unless you have an ancient camera with a locking shutter button.
Buy a cheap Chinese copy remote off eBay, they work fine.

Another option some might want to look into is 'killing the ambient" this is where you use a bright artificial light to light your subject and set the cameras exposure to match that higher light level. The result is everything that isn't artificially lit becomes underexposed and thus appears to be in the dark.

Again not car shots I'm afraid but I took these shots to experiment, both were taken mid-day in summer.

The advantage of doing this is you don't have to work in the dark and due to the high speed shutter settings required you can work hand held and shoot moving objects. You need a lot of artificial light mind.

Just stick some gaffer tape over the shutter press LOL!