taking pictures at night ?

[BamaSixGun]

can't seem to get a good pic of the PSD all lighted up at night.

if i take it with the flash, its ok, but it lights up the truck and drowns out the lights.

if i take it with no flash, it looks like one big, white orangish red BLOB.

any tips would be greatly apweshiated!

 

[bushpilot]

in a word...TRIPOD 1st then youll need to turn the flash off...you may
have to play w/ shutter speeds to get enough light so the truck shows
up....its trial and error for the most part (unless youve got a light meter).

depending on the camera you maybe able to set the shutter to
REAR curtain or SLOW allowing the flash more time to travel (giving
more light to the background & potentially washing out the truck LESS).

 

[jharvey]

Stephen, what kind of camera have you got?
Does it allow you to manually set the shutter speed and aperature?

Like Bushpilot said, you'll for sure need a tripod, turn off the flash, set the aperature to f16 and shutter speed to approx 2 seconds and see how that works. You can then play with the shutter speed more or less to get a good shot.

 

[BamaSixGun]

ya'll slow down now, ya'll gonna have to speak in english for me john & bush.

i use my wife's digital camara, don't know if it does shutter speed and all that camara geek talk. i'm sure you can put it on a tripod, i do know you can changed it from autoflash to no flash, but i think thats it.

please help.

 

[Big K]

Model # would help

 

[jharvey]

Model # would help

Yepper that'd be a big help, we can look it up and see what it will and won't do.

 

[JLDickmon]

cain'tcha jes hole yer finger o'er the flashybulb?

 

[BamaSixGun]

Yepper that'd be a big help, we can look it up and see what it will and won't do.

sorry it took so long to get back, had fall baseball game tonight with my 8YO.

lets see, the model is HP photosmart 720

it is a 3.3 pixel, auto focus 3x optical zoom / 12x zoom ?

maybe that will help

 

[jharvey]

Well I hate to tell ya this but, I doubt that you will get the kind of shot you want with that particular camera. Just not enough manual settings to get it right.

Now having said that you may want to whip out the manual and go thru the exposure settings sections and play around some, since your truck is darker than a neutral color to get the color right you'll need to dial in about -1 stops on the exposure scale problem is the lights, they are still going to be what's called "blown out" meaning over exposed.

Ideally you would take two images, one exposed for the truck itself and the other exposed for the lights, DO NOT move the camera between shots, then you could merge the two in photoshop or corel and adjust the individual layers.

Hate to be the bearer of unkind wisdom but that's photography for ya