Night City Photos.

[BoomAM]

I know about Gimp, im running Linux/Vista dualboot on my lappy atm.

Forgot about my Zen webspace , so here you go people:

This is a before & after i messed with the settings:
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0575.JPG
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0576.JPG


The below pics look fine detail wise, just lack sunlight:
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0577.JPG
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0632.JPG
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0636.JPG
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0638.JPG
http://www.zen111134.zen.co.uk/Japan/IMG_0639.JPG

 

[rpstewart]

The below pics look fine detail wise, just lack sunlight:

I think you're just running into the main problem we all have with this sort of shot - digital cameras just can't render the dynamic range of the scene. The camera is giving you an average exposure for the shot which is great for the shadow areas but not great for the sky which gets overexposed and turns out that bleached out white colour rather than the shades of blue you'd expect. There are ways round it:

• Shoot early in the morning or later in the afternoon when the sunlight is less strong
• Take multiple shots of the same scene and combine them - check out cyKey's HDR guide
• Use a graduated neutral density filter to reduce the brightness in the sky - difficult to use in a cityscape though.

It might be worthwile using f/5.6 rather than f/2.8 for your aperture though if you can get away with it, the shots might benefit from the larger depth of field that this would give you.

 

[dunker]

sometimes it's tricky not over exposing the sky and keeping everything on the ground propery exposed with a compact which looks like is whats happening in the pics, was the sky blue? what you can do is take two photos in exactly the same place preferably using a tripod and expose one photo for the ground and one photo for the sky so you'll have one photo with a pure white sky but properly exposed ground and another with blue sky and clouds properly exposed but the ground really dull. then you merge these in photo editing software and there's tutorials for doing that kind of thing, "hdr" or something like that. or just use the dull ground one and select everything but the sky then increase contrast-brightness, or make sure the sun is behind you might work too polarising? sunglasses held infront of the lens maybe that'll work too?

 

[BoomAM]

So basically, without going to 'extreme' or 'inconvienient' lengths, these are the best im gonna get from the camera sunlight wise?
If so, then im ok with that, as in all honesty, they arnt that bad of pictures, very detailed, and nothing that a quick session in a photo session cant go someway to fixing.

Thanks for the help guys & gals.
Much appriciated.