Recently, I was talking with someone about photography. Because that guy is living near Frankfurt, I was checking, where and when I published my images taken in Frankfurt. Surprisingly, they are not here on my blog. The posts are still online but don’t have any images in. I put the images on a separate gallery server that doesn’t exist anymore and set only a link to that location in the post. So, this is kind of a repost.
I was in Frankfurt for a training in November 2009. As I would have been alone in a hotel each night, I took my tripod and my camera with me and planned to go out after the training for taking some night shots in the city. That was my first trip for night photography. The difficulty is to balance the bright lights with the extreme darks while having quite long exposure times.
First I went to a certain skyscraper where you can go on top of the building to have a view over the city. The sky was proposing, unfortunately, it was extremely windy. Setting up my tripod as planned was impossible. The wind simply moved the tripod away. So, I dialed in a quite high ISO to get my shots hand-held without the tripod. The ultra-wide-angle lens allowed me to use a quite open aperture to get a good depth of field and still have the exposure time on a handleable value for hand-holding the camera despite the heavy wind.
At that time, I wasted a lot of quality not only because I had to use high ISO instead of my tripod. I also relinquished to photograph in RAW instead of JPG. For this post, I took out the original images and retouched them as much as possible. But, there was not much possible to recover.
Whenever possible, go the extra mile and photograph in raw. You have so much more quality.
After leaving the tower I also walked a bit through the city. Now, I was able to use my tripod. These images are taken at ISO 200 and aperture times of several seconds each.
What have I learned from that trip?
- use RAW!!!!!
- I should have split that trip into parts to have the nice blue night-sky in all images
- I should have closed the aperture more to get nice stars around the small lights
- I should have taken more than one shot with different exposure times while leaving the other settings unchanged (bracketing)
Take care!
MyBlog - solaner 
Ohne RAW Format verschenkst du extrem viel Potential, das merkt man gerade in kritischen Situationen (z.B. Nachtfotografie ) Herzlicher Gruss, Jürgen
Ja, das stimmt. Und genau deshalb habe ich das ja auch so geschrieben. Auch bei den heutigen Sensoren, mit ihrer viel besseren Ergebnissen, geht für mich nichts mehr ohne RAW. Wenn das RAW gut ist, brauch ich doch schließlich nur auf konvertieren klicken und gut ist. Wo ist die Mehr-Arbeit? Doppel-Speicherung als RAW + JPG ist für mich Platz-Verschwendung.