I had two cameras at my disposal, a compact and my SLR. The first group of shots were taken with the compact. This has a much smaller chip than the SLR and subsequently suffers more from noise in the images. It is also more automatic so has selected ISO and shutter speed itself at what it considers to be the best option. You can see the camera does not always get it right and some of the shots suffer a little from camera shake (partially my own fault for disabling the flash so that I could get just the lights from the city).
In amongst the shots above are a good example of a floodlit building and a brightly lit store front. Both were taken hand held.
The compact camera took care of white balance for all the pictures above. I think it handled this pretty well. On a separate occassion I had my SLR to hand. The following shots were taken with this.
A little about the technique I used here. As I was on holiday with my wife, I didn't really want to have to carry a tripod around with me. For the shots with the SLR, I always found something to stand the camera on such as a table or simply a post. I then used the camera's self timer as a kind of automatic cable release.
For the large interior shot below I was able to hand hold the camera due to a combination of a wide angle lens and the fact that this particular lens has image stabilisation. On this shot the white balance has been adjusted in the RAW converter by picking a white area as a sample. There are two different light sources in this photo - daylight from a large overhead skylight and then the light from the shops themselves. The white balance has been set to the daylight coming through the skylight, leaving the shop lighting to show with an orange tint.
Finally for this exercise I was required to capture light streams from traffic from a high location. I haven't done this kind of thing before so it was quite an interesting exercise. I set out to our neighbourhood dual carriageway equipped with my tripod and 24-105mm lens. When I got there it was still light so I set up and checked out my options while I waited for the light to fade. In one direction I had a roundabout and in the other a dual carriageway.
As it got darker I started taking pictures with a small aperture and very low ISO (50). This was to combat noise but also get the shutter speeds slower. I took about 60 images from various angles and with different amounts of light. I didn't find it necessary to change my settings too much. After a bit of experimentation I found that twenty seconds seemed to do the job.
Out of all the images I chose some that actually do show the road (although there was a lot of ambient light in one direction from some street lights). My reason for doing this is because I always see light trails on a black background. I think it is quite interesting to see some other detail with the light seemingly super-imposed on top. I have also picked what I hope to be slightly more abstract views. Below are four images from that evening.
Conclusion
Shooting outdoors at night was an interesting exercise which has resulted in a style I might not otherwise have tried. The factors to be aware of when doing night photography are noise in the images and slow shutter speeds although with modern cameras which have less noisy high ISO settings, this is becoming less of a problem. Slow shutter speeds can often be exploited by showing movement as in the case of the traffic light trails. Finally, you may have to consider your white balance settings carefully depending on your subject.
