First attempt at low light photography

[Magog]

These shots were taken on a trip to London last Friday; a bloomin' cold evening to be lurking on the south bank of the Thames with a tripod.

Both shots taken with an EF-S 17-85mm lens on my EOS 60D. I shot in RAW + jpeg; these are the unprocessed jpeg images.

ISO 100 f8 25s EV-1/3


Does the "L" shaped composition work? I thought the red of the reflection drew the eye in, then across from the London Eye to the House of Parliament - but now I'm not so sure. (Yes, I do need to remove an aircraft trail from the image!).

ISO 100 f8 30s EV-1/3


I like the curve of the Millenium Bridge leading across to St Pauls; this is my favourite shot from the evening, but I'm sure it can be improved!

Comments welcome as ever

John

[chauncey]

Two things strike me with both images...I want the background to be in better focus and the verticals
to be in alignment. Maybe caused by choice of glass??

[NorthernFocus]

Nicely done. I've no done any nigh photography myself so have no input on the technical aspects. I really like the composition in the second shot. The buildings in the first shot do seem to all be leaning toward center as mentioned by the prior post. Overall a nice first effort I'd say.

[Downrigger]

Color, composition, and drama great in both but particularly the second. I too find them both a little soft, and for some reason it seems to me that one of the appealing features of night-city lights images is the real crispness they achieve excepting the nice effects on sees sometime with fog. I'm guessing that lens has a little barrel distortion - certainly my Nikon version of it does. That should correct easily in post.

[Shadowman]

Oh, what fun times are ahead for you. Keep at it and enjoy.

[dubaiphil]

One thing that may be well worth trying:

Use Live View to zoom right in and focus and then switch the lens or body to manual focus (presumably you can do this on Canon) - Otherwise the camera may hunt

Another thing:

What tripod are you using? With longer exposures, especially if it's breezy, you may get some camera shake. A high quality tripod may help here, as well as not extending the centre post if you have one. If it was windy, then shooting at f4 and ISO 400 should give you low noise images with a much shorter shutter speed. Try different aperture and shutter speed combos, zooming in to check critical focus.

And lastly:

What method are you using for releasing the shutter? If you don't have a remote release then using the self timer to around 2 seconds may help.

[Magog]

Thanks for the comments, guys. To pick up some of the points:

William and Dan, the verticals are a bit of an issue; the first shot had the lens at 24mm, so towards the wide end. With upright items at each side of the frame, I guess there will not be much I can do to level it up.

Mark, I must say I hadn't thought too much about the "softness" - certainly I can look at contrast/sharpening in full processing. Also I'm going to tinker with the white balance to see how this affects the result.

Phil, you make some good points. I was shooting in autofocus, but with image stabilisation turned off. I was using Live view, and moving the little focussing "square" around the screen to position it over well defined point in the image. The focus was achieved fairly quickly, without much hunting.

I was using an old (20 years+) Slik 35D tripod, which is a fairly heavy lump, certainly when lugging it around for 8 hours! The centre column was usually extended about 6-9", but there was no wind that evening.

For the first half of the evening I was using a remote release (including the first shot), but it stopped working after a couple of hours, so the other shots were taken using 2s self timer.

John