Night Photography

[nightshade]

My old slr is in semi retirement and the digitals are taking over
but i am not convinced, try taking pics. of pipistrelles, the view finder aint bright enough the flashes neither
Anyone got this electrickery photography taped
Anyone photographed bats or similar?

[Jonny]

No bats, but I got this Badger last year...............Jon

[nightshade]

I usually only see them this close in my headlights, good photo!

[wildone]

Hi Nightshade
You may remember some images of bats flying, posted last year by topkartcomer. May I sugest that you send an e-mail asking for info about camera, lighting etc. I haven't noticed any posts for some time which is why I think e-mail rather that a PM.

[nightshade]

Thanks Wildone but I have already been in touch with topkartcomer,I will persevere.
Bats are to easily disturbed to make regular attempts but one night I will be in the right place at the right time

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by nightshade

My old slr is in semi retirement and the digitals are taking over
but i am not convinced, try taking pics. of pipistrelles, the view finder aint bright enough the flashes neither
Anyone got this electrickery photography taped
Anyone photographed bats or similar?

I've got some shots I did with my 300D and a few flash guns rigged up to PIR detectors taken off a security system. My approach was to lock the shutter open on long exposures so that the flash firing took the picture - like photographing lightning.

One big advantage of digital is that I took over 1000 shots and got 15 useable ones, of which 2 were very good. Wouldnt want to do that ratio with film. (you'd be talking in the region of £195 to do that on provia 400f)

The pics are very big Tiff files which wont open on my work computer but I'll transform and resize the two best next time I visit the double headed turion rig which lives at my mums ( because her house insurance is better than mine)

[Chalk Downlanders]

Eeyore
You say your pictures are Tiffs. Have you tried working in RAW?

[Marvin Africa]

The last time I tried working in the RAW I was arrested!

[Alan]

Originally Posted by Marvin Africa

The last time I tried working in the RAW I was arrested!

Excellent........Lol

You wanna try working in the tiff, the jpegs don't half ache

[Kev Lewis]

The downside of using the latest digital cameras with their cropped sensors is the lack of light in the viewfinder. If you go to a full frame sensor like the 1Ds then the viewfinder would be as bright as an older SLR. The sensor sensitivity is as good as film and flashguns should not be effected as long as any zoom facility takes account of the reduced field of view of the digital slr.

[Chalk Downlanders]

^
^^
Wa wa wa waaaaaaaaaaa

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by Sticky

Eeyore
You say your pictures are Tiffs. Have you tried working in RAW?

I do work in Raw (well a lot of the time I work in Jpeg fine) but when you use RAW conversion software the final output is a TIFF file - in essence the Raw is the negative, the Tiff is the "print"

I certainly wouldnt try to output a TIFF direct from the camera, that would be very slow.

[speckled wood]

If you are prepared to try long exposures you can take a lot of interesting night scenes. You don't need an slr (I do have a Canon EOS300D) some of the older olympus digicams like the 2040 and the 5050 have 1.8 lenses and exposure times up to 16 seconds. One thing you quickly learn is that even on an overcast night there is so much background lighting (from distant streetlamps that a 16 second exposure at full apature out in the middle of the countryside will still get you a picture.

I still love and covet my old OM1 and Bronica but rarely use them .... by the way at 54 years of age I am a semi-oldie.

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by nightshade

My old slr is in semi retirement and the digitals are taking over
but i am not convinced, try taking pics. of pipistrelles, the view finder aint bright enough the flashes neither
Anyone got this electrickery photography taped
Anyone photographed bats or similar?

Glsammy has some classicc bat pics in the galllery, Daubies I thunks

[cherrybee]

Originally Posted by speckled wood

.... by the way at 54 years of age I am a semi-oldie.

I am 54 but dont feel like a semi oldie nor any kind of oldie You are as young as you feel

[speckled wood]

Originally Posted by cherrybee

I am 54 but dont feel like a semi oldie nor any kind of oldie You are as young as you feel

Type 2 diabetes and the inability to do more than 60 miles a day on my pushbike tells me that I am going downhill .... slowly.

[glsammy]

Originally Posted by eeyore

Glsammy has some classicc bat pics in the galllery, Daubies I thunks

Yes, but mine were taken in full daylight. Not much chance of seeing that again.

[gopher]

Everyone, please, do all your work in RAW, jpeg restricts you down the workflow, and there's no going back for the shot again.

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by gopher

Everyone, please, do all your work in RAW, jpeg restricts you down the workflow, and there's no going back for the shot again.

True -Kinda- but unless you have a very expensive camera RAW restricts the depth and speed of your burst, and your buffering, important when covering action, It also halfs the storage capacity (in terms of numbers of shots) of your cards. which might mean that you dont get the once in a life time shot at all

I have been working largely in jpeg fine for nearly 3 years, converting to tiff in photoshop and have never found it overly restrictive. I do use raw in low light environments due to noise considerations tho

at the end of the day it comes down to personal preffeence and camera capability so my advice to everyone would be to work in whatever you are most comfortable with

[glsammy]

I shoot virtually exclusively in RAW mode. About the only time I don't is when I'm in holiday tourist mode!
I tried RAW when I has an FZ30, but it was useless for continous mode. Better to use jpeg than get no shot at all.

[onionade]

im not 100% sure but its my understanding that a digital slr works in the exact same way as an analogue slr i.e. the light that passes through the lense is the exact same as what passes through the viewfinder so there should be no difference at all between the brightness and clarity of the viewfinder between analogue and digital slr's.

lossless file formats (RAW) like .TIFF and .NEF are uncompressed unlike jpeg's which are compressed and have smaller file sizes, not as good all round qaulity and exhibit artifacts (on a pixel level) compared with RAW, by compressing a file it means that a large amount of information has been removed (whether at a glance its noticeable or not, it has still been removed).

I think most, if not all digital cameras (especially digital slr's) will always take a photo in raw and then the camera itself will convert that image (using an algorythm) into a jpeg file, so the camera istself is compressing the image before you d/l it to your computer. In my experience its always better to take a picture in RAW format and then convert it later to a jpeg (if you have to) and some camera's have a setting called RAW + JPEG where the camera will save each shot in both file formats for you (i know this is true for the nikon slr's).

So RAW files will always be better as they dont contain any compression whatsoever, the same can be said for digital music, your cd player will play a cd in an uncompressed format, it should sound very nice and sharp, clean sounds and bass lines, on the other hand an mp3 has been compressed and much of the information has been removed to make it smaller hence an mp3 will never quite sound as good as its cd counterpart (or .wav file).