Here’s one of my favorite shots of The Guggenheim Museum at night.
A great way to add interest to the photos you take of your own city is to shoot at night. I’d make this a travel tip but who wants to lug around a tripod when traveling. It kind of kills the spontaneity and fun when you’re in a new city but when you live there, bring that big stupid tripod out at night.
For architecture like this, you’ll need to set your camera to Aperture Priority so you can get the most depth of field with as much in focus as you can. f8 – f11 is good.
You’ll also need to take multiple exposures. You can make this as difficult as you want but I find that setting my 60D to taking exposures that are 1 2/3 stops apart works just fine.
When I get them home, I use the Photomatix Pro and just use the basic default, Exposure Fusion option. The aim here is to get something natural looking that simply contains as much tonal range as possible.
The output from Photomatix now contains texture and detail in both the shadows and those important highlights too. You can now adjust and play to your hearts content knowing that there is plenty of latitude in the image file.
So next time you’re out on your home turf, give in to your internal vampire and try a little nocturnal photography.
And as always, please help me keep this site alive by browsing through my ebooks or photo galleries of beautiful New York City black and white photography. There you can select a gorgeous high-resolution print file that you can download for only $20 and print it anywhere yourself. And I’ll donate 20% of the purchase price to one of the following global humanitarian charities that you can select on checkout: UNESCO, Unicef, Earthwatch, Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch and The Hunger Project
Until next time, happy shooting.
Bob