The Hsinchu HSR station, which is actually located in Jhubei. Taken on the 13th of January 2007 with a Nikon D200 and a 18-35mm lens. Part of the HSR Hsinchu Series 1.
Right after work, my wife and I are heading to the HSR terminal in Jhubei and taking the train to Taichung.
Why?
To try out the train.
I have been told that there have been lots of problems with ticketing. The machines are hard to use.
I tried them out and I had about 3 people around me helping me; there were at least 2 English speakers in the lot trying to help out. It is pretty simple (but clumsy to use) and has these snazzy touchscreens. The cash slots are cool too, since they accept bills any way you can push them in, not just one way. My only concern is making the return trip on time, since it is only ten minutes after we arrive.
If the trains are on time, it shouldn’t be a problem.
If there are any problems, we will have to take the 8:29 PM train back to Hsinchu.
As much as I would like to just go home and take it easy, I find that I need the push to actually go out and do things. On Saturday, I debated with myself if I should go and take pictures for a fraction of a second. I debated again with myself how long I should stay, since it was taking a long time for dusk to settle and darkness to creep in.
I have to be ready to snap away. I might even set my camera on continuous shots so that I can take a lot of pictures in a short time.
These were my initial settings of my D200.
- ISO 1EV above 1600 -> ISO 3200
- Image Quality -> NEF(RAW)+JPEG Fine
- RAW Compression Enabled
- JPEG Compression Enabled
- Shooting Mode S but can be easily set to CL or CH (Continous Low Speed or Continuous High Speed)
- Exposure Mode P (full auto), but with the jog dial, I can easily set it to S (Shutter speed priority 1.3-2sec) I find that these times are the best for the type of photos I plan on taking. I do not plan on taking very long exposures tonight (I might try some though). Otherwise, I would need to lower ISO and use a tripod. I can experiment with this tonight, especially if a HSR train comes by.
My hope is that by setting ISO 3200 and using the RAW format, I will be able to reduce the noise generated by my camera during night photography. Otherwise, I will just lower ISO to 400.
If you are planning on shooting a long exposure, there is no point in using a high ISO setting (unless you like the effect of a noisy image).
One of the reasons why I take photos at such a high ISO setting, is that I like the effects that I get with it.
Photographing the night sky is something that can be very rewarding, but it requires a lot of patience. Of course, you will want to use your camera’s lowest ISO setting and experiment with different exposure times. However, one of the biggest problems with taking pictures of the sky is light pollution. Light pollution is most frequently caused by city lights shining into the sky. The result is that your sky images are going to be very bright when they are exposed for a long period of time.
There are ways to clean up an image, but you must use a digital processing program like Photoshop. For now, I am slowly getting to know my camera. I have experimented most of the time with high ISO shots. I will have to try to reduce that for long exposure shots to ISO 200-800, at least that is what is recommended.
One of the things I like about night photography is capturing movement. The other thing is actually using the high ISO to capture different moods of buildings and things that normally look a lot different.
These are the settings I will use tonight for longer exposures:
- ISO 200-800 maximum to reduce noise
- Bracketing: the D200 has a auto bracketing feature. Bracketing is a technique to try and capture the perfect shot. It creates a bracketing sequence by varying the exposure in a predetermined series.
- Image Quality -> NEF(RAW)+JPEG Fine
- RAW Compression Enabled
- JPEG Compression Enabled
- Long Exp NR On
- High ISO NR On
- Shooting Mode S, but I will use CL if I am bracketing.
- Exposure Mode P (full auto) and S (shutter priority)
With these two schemes, I should be able to take some great pictures. The downside of these settings is that I can only take 318 photos without compression. With compression, I should be able to take double that number. When I normally use JPEG Fine quality settings, I can take almost 2000 shots. NEF (RAW) compression should work at 40-50%. In any case, I will also have JPEGs of the same shot.
From the D200 manual:
Exposure and flash bracketing are recommended in situations in which it is difficult to set exposure and there is not enough time to check results and adjust settings with each shot.
I googled “ISO Setting Night Photography” and read the following tutorials:
memoirs on a rainy day 
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