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HDR at Night

Posted on September 25, 2012 // 2 Comments

HDR at Night

HDR at Night

Mer­chan­dise of Extinc­tion — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

I’m becom­ing a fan of shoot­ing HDR at night. It makes for a great study of con­trasts. Light and Dark. Cool and Warm. When I look at the indi­vid­ual pho­tos shot in the auto-​exposure bracket for these scene, none really stands out as the right expo­sure. The shad­ows are too deep when the lights are exposed well, and the lights are blown out when you get detail in the shad­ows. Shoot­ing HDR at night gives you the chance to bring out sub­tle tex­tures in the shad­ows with­out over­pow­er­ing the lights — except where you want them to jump out for a bit of impact.

Cre­at­ing brack­eted expo­sures at night isn’t with­out a slight chal­lenge, though. My Nikon D700 can cre­ate up to 9 auto-​exposure brack­ets, which gives a lot of range. The prob­lem is that none of those expo­sures can exceed 30 sec­onds of shut­ter speed. If you try shoot­ing more expo­sures, some of those longer expo­sures near the end are going to be iden­ti­cal when they hit that 30 sec­ond bar­rier. That’s when you have to switch to Man­ual mode and do some math in your head to deter­mine if your long expo­sures are going to roll past 30 sec­onds. You can exceed that limit by using Bulb mode, which basi­cally lets you leave the shut­ter open until you release the but­ton to turn it off. It helps to have a watch or timer to know how long you’ve been expos­ing a frame.

The same issue comes up for some Neu­tral Den­sity long expo­sures. I know there are iPhone apps to do the math for you, but it seems like a bit of overkill to me. Each frame needs to leave the shut­ter open twice as long as the last one. I tend to let the Auto-​Exposure brack­ets work for any shots up to 30 sec­onds, and then I switch to Bulb mode to get the remain­ing shots. If the last one was 30 sec­onds, the next one dou­bles to a minute, and so on down the line. I’d hate to think I needed an app just to mul­ti­ply by two.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll always shoot HDR at night. Just more often than I have in the past. After all, pho­tog­ra­phy is just play­ing with light. We may as well play when the lights suit us.

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About William

Author, Photographer and IT Manager. I have a fondness for chocolate. I also own Suburbia Press and Aperture vs Lightroom.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Pixie.Dust.Pictures Scott Bax­ter

    The issue you describe here is exactly why I wish there were an “HDR mode” option for Auto ISO. In other words, it would be pre­sumed you would use this mode with a tri­pod, so the ISO would devi­ate from the nom­i­nal level you set only as needed to have your expo­sures not need to exceed 30 sec­onds in length, and only to the degree nec­es­sary, so that you can avoid switch­ing to man­ual. If such a mode could be fur­ther cus­tomized so that you set a max­i­mum expo­sure length (to be exceeded only when even higher ISO alone won’t give you enough expo­sure), it would be even bet­ter. Sure, higher ISO means more noise, but so does a longer expo­sure, even at lower ISO. Some­where along the spec­trum, there’s a point at which the two meet, so that set­ting a lower ISO might not really be givi­ing you any advan­tage in terms of noise. And some­times you just don’t want such long expo­sures. I’m sure you’ve expe­ri­enced times at WDW where you pre­pare to take a brack­eted set when the coast is clear, only to have some­one stroll into your shot while you are tak­ing your longer expo­sures (and those peo­ple will always stop within the frame, so you can’t hope the long shut­ter speed will ren­der them invis­i­ble). It is at times like that that I wish I could up the ISO for those last cou­ple of overexposures.

    I shoot as much HDR at night as I do sun­set and sun­rise — at Walt Dis­ney World and in artificially-​lighted envi­ron­ments, night is my third-​favorite time to shoot, and I run up against the 30-​second brick wall ALL THE TIME. I usu­ally either shoot an addi­tional set at higher ISO all the through and pull out the frames I’ll need later, or I’ll stop shoot­ing mid-​set and change the ISO for the longer expo­sures man­u­ally. It would cer­tainly be nice to set this sort of thing up and have it avail­able as a sin­gle menu setting.

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