On a scale of 1 to 10 I feel like I am at 0.5 at being a photography expert. Ansel Adam fans need not worry. But but.....
some estimates have it that I have the best camera on the market when it comes to a night photography off of a full frame camera. (Easy now.....I am not talking about Hasselblad H4D or Setiz or Leica S2-P here - I am talking about camera rest of us human being can afford - still a hefty chunk though - like ~8-10K mind you!! for the body and few solid lenses that is!!).
Just ask Gary L Friedman, a professional photographer who has written several books on photography; per him Sony Alpha 99 edges out Canon Mark III and Nikon D800 when it comes to overall photo quality. See his picture comparison below shot at night - specially the windows on the dark building on the lower right on each frame - All pics were shot at 6400 ISO from the different models listed below. Looks like A99 is the clear winner here. Also notice the noise level. Thanks Friedman dude for boosting my ego.
So this peeked my interest on night photography that I never had in a hurry. I picked up my camera and decided to go on a shooting rampage - at the roof of my condo (only place I felt safe enough for night photography in BKK!!!).
For starters, playing around with my settings, I shot below pic at ISO 800 with a tripod, exposed for 10 Sec with F13 on my wide angle Carl Zeiss 24 mm 2.0 Lens. It was shot at around 10 PM at night with no moon light and with naked eye you could only make out the shapes of the buildings. You however, of course, could see all the windows with lights. (They tell you to shoot RAW, ohhhh to capture all the details, so I did, only to touch up a bit for WB in Photoshop later and cropped some as well) What started out as 25 MB size image scaled down to 12.5 MB by the time I was done with saving it as a JPEG. Camera was set to WB Tungsten lamp btw. Why did I choose this WB setting I don't know. I thought blue looked cooler than the other colors - that's why - or because of the fact that I self scored at 0.5 out of 10 haha. Well...what do you think? Is it a good start? I sure can't tell. All I can say is compared to what the eyes saw detail here is as if someone gave you a night vision goggle.
Liking what I saw in my view finder in terms of what this toy could do, I thought why stop there and swung my tripod around by 60 Deg or so to focus where the buildings were a lot closer. This time I decided to give ISO 200 a try to see how much reduction there would be on the digital noise (above picture still has digital noise if you were to zoom in a bit). I set it up to F4 this time with 10 Sec exposure again. Below is what I got.
I was blown away by the amount of light I captured and the reduction in noise. In fact I could have probably gone one F stop higher - it otherwise looks almost like a day time picture for such a dark night. And believe when I say this - it was moon less night and you could barely see the buildings. With F4 focused to infinity I was not sure if I would get everything in focus. With higher F stop I could have had everything in crisp focus - but then I would have had to increase the ISO also which would have beaten the purpose of this exercise to lower the ISO as much as I can.
Now the ultimate!!! What if I tried at 100 ISO close to 11 PM at night and re-shot the first scene?? This time I was going to set the WB to Daylight. Yes Daylight - because this was per one of the Landscape Photography Instructor. Per him you could capture more colors and adjust the WB later if I needed to - as long I shot RAW.
Above is what I got and I was happy with this outcome. No WB adjustment needed. Hardly any noise and that's the main thing here. This photo was not touched up PS at all. Size of whopping 25 MB. I could zoom in and see every details.
Next stop !! To shoot the light trails, you know the ones that is coming out of the car, that's half way decent (that's worh putting in a blog) as well as shooting sky and capturing milky way galaxy. and all them stars.
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