Some Fz5 night shots

[nachos]

Well the weather has been crap ever since I got my Fz5, so I haven't really had any opportunities to test the camera. So I went out and toke my first night shots instead, getting really eager to take some pics...

Anyhow, still need to learn the camera...



Screwed up on this one, didn't think about the snow lighting up the picture that much...

x12 from previous "bright" pic...

Cheers

[audioedge]

looks like your white balance is out

[nachos]

Yeah I know, using auto WB. But the snow was pretty darn orange from the lighting too. Anyway, I don't mind that much, as I kind of like the effect.

Going to shoot some better shots this weekend, if the weather alouds it that is. Try and get me some deer.:-)

[Corpsy]

I've been practising repairing bad white balance in Photoshop. Hope you don't mind me taking the liberty of experimenting with your photos.

On the photo of the snowy, tree lined road, you can look at the color channels and see that there is not much data in the green channel, and next to none in the blue channel except where it blends to make the white snow and lights. This makes it pretty much impossible to restore the original colors, but the orange can at least be toned down.

I used the channel mixer to bring down the red levels a lot, and tweaked the other channels a bit. I used curves to bring up the midtones a bit as well. Here's the weird part, it looks like I sharpened the image, but actually I went into the channels, duplicated the blue channel which now looked very sharp, and pasted that as a luminosity layer at 75% opacity.

[Corpsy]

The factory picture was a different story. It looks very orange, but if you go into the channels you'll see that all three channels have a lot of data. Using the channel mixer, I toned down the red channel and tweaked the others a bit and the detail really popped out. I used levels to brighten it back up after removing so much red light data.

[zygh]

That's a much better job, Corpsy.

Anyway, nachos, why didn't you set manually the color balance? I think that might have helped a little.

The photos are nice and, imho, well framed. Did you use a tripod? What setting did you use for the camera?

Thanks.

[nachos]

Corpsy, thanks for the PP jobs. The WB wasn't that much at fault really, because the live scenary was actually really orange due to the snow and lighting.

Zygh, this was basiclly my first test with the camera. And yes I was using a tripod, didn't really mess around with the settings that much, mostly changing the shutter speeds from 4-8 sec and let the camera do the rest.

[nachos]

Ok so the sun showed for the first time in weeks, so I toke some pictures of it setting. But when I came home the result was a bit too dark, guess that I should have used more exposure...?




And this one got away, had a real good shot but blew it...

[mtngal]

I'm no expert on this but a couple of things come to mind when I looked at your photos. First, your photographing a snowy landscape - light reflecting off of the snow will fool the lens thinking that it is lighter than it really is. Generally speaking, if you are shooting in snow plan on going +1/3 or +2/3. Since I've been happier keeping my camera at -2/3 for the most part outside, I put exposure compensation at 0 today when I was playing in the snow.

Second thing that came to mind is that the sky looks pretty good (or is my monitor too bright?), while the ground is dark. If you were to expose for the ground, you might end up with a white sky. You might be asking too much of the camera to try to properly expose both elements. One answer is to take two photos, one metered for the sky and one for the ground and then use photoshop to merge the two.