Evening city skyline

"Derek Fountain" wrote in message
...
I'm considering taking photos of city skylines in the evening/nightime. To
the eye, such a scene is basically dark, with the buildings appearing
pretty much black against a greyish/blue sky. Those buildings have
yellowish white lights in the windows. You might get a road with car tail
lights in the foreground. Here in Perth, Australia, the best city skyline
view has a sweeping expanse of river towards the foreground, so I'm hoping
for rippling reflections.

I've just got a DSLR and haven't yet tried to capture this scene.
Experience
is rapidly telling me that technique is a lot more important with a DSLR
than the P&S I upgraded from! So, I'm thinking about how the metering
works, and presume that faced with such a predominately black scene the
camera is going to try to get the light levels up. The image will
therefore
come out lighter than my eye is seeing, and the lights in the buildings
will probably blow out. In my ignorance I'd turn the AE compensation down
a
bit and see what happens.

What tips can the assembled experts give me for getting a photo that
matches
how the eye sees things?

I wouldn't call myself an expert, but as you know if you go strictly by the
meter every shot will look like it was taken at noon. :-) I would try using
the spot meter and concentrating on the highlights to see what happens.
Otherwise, just bracket a lot and use a tripod. You might look at some
posted shots of city night scenes and note what shutter speed and aperture
they used as a guide.

Try metering on the sky .... Perth sky should be quite the same as Sydney
skies now I believe?

I'd have thought... )

Do a CWA metering on the sky with around 1/4 of the frame touching the
buildings [hopefully the buildings are lit]
Do an AE lock on that value ... recompose and shot.

If the sky is already dark , use a tripod.

Great, thanks. I'll give that method a try.

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I wouldn't call myself an expert, but as you know if you go strictly by
the
meter every shot will look like it was taken at noon. :-)

Exactly - that's precisely what I'm trying to avoid!

I would try
using the spot meter and concentrating on the highlights to see what
happens.

It's a 20D, so no spot meter. Presumably that's the important feature they
left out to make people buy the 25D in a year's time. But the 9% partial
metering should do the job nicely - it's a big target I'm aiming at.

Thanks for the tip.

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Now I switch to full manual and dial in f/8 at 1/2 sec.

Thanks for the tips. One question though - why do you switch to full manual?
If you're keeping the lens on the f8 sweet spot why not leave it in Av
mode?

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Derek Fountain writes:

Now I switch to full manual and dial in f/8 at 1/2 sec.

Thanks for the tips. One question though - why do you switch to full manual?
If you're keeping the lens on the f8 sweet spot why not leave it in Av
mode?

Can't answer for the OP, but I don't expect auto-exposure to do a
vaguely decent job on that kind of subject; it doesn't obey the rules
auto-exposure is built to work with. So I'd naturally use manual
exposure to keep the auto from messing up my pictures.
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