Small advice about night shots with Lumia 920

[un hombre]

Just a small finding from my experience.

I noticed, that at night, when you are trying to make photos on the street (good light from street lamps) pictures tend to come overly bright. This happens when you use:

- Scene mode: Auto (default),
- ISO: Default,
- Exposure: 0 (default).

If you want more realistic and better detailed photos, you need to play with different ISO and Exposure levels.

Here is a small example:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=BFC945D85A86B14A!268&authkey=!AP_qsb5z-4587Z0

Too bad skydrive will not give you picture properties, like ISO, exposure etc...

You will find three different levels of exposure here: 0 (default), -1, -2

Also, the very last picture was done with ISO set to 100.

My advice is, that you will never get a good result at night if you limit yourself with default settings - lights and surroundings are too bright (that is when you have a good lighting).
Playing with camera settings will give you better, more interesting results.

I am no camera expert, just wanted to share this with some examples

 

[George Ponder]

yep... you're basically telling the camera to underexpose the image by adjusting the exposure controls and slowing down the ISO. Just wish Nokia would have kept the same level of settings on the 920 as what you would find on the 900. A center spot metering mode might help with the bright lights at night and sharpness adjustments could tackle the softness.

 

[Jalik]

On one hand I really would like to pull the trigger and get a 920 to play with that camera. What you did with exposure and ISO is what I constantly have to do with my 800 in order to get decent results in low light conditions. On the other hand having read that you can't play with the settings the same way as in 7.5 really makes me wait. For what I don't know. Just seems wrong

Nice shots btw

 

[karmamule]

While I agree that you can frequently improve results if you customize the settings, I don't agree with the "never get a good result at night if you limit yourself with default settings". I've been taking lots of nighttime pictures with default settings and have very much liked the results in many cases. I have seen some that are over-bright etc. that need some settings work if you want to get better shots, but at least for me the defaults can frequently still have very nice results.

That's important for me too because I like taking lots of photos "on the go" and don't want to have to futz with settings on each photo, and the Lumia 920 has made me very happy in that regard.

Here are some photos I took recently around Boston that I posted to G+. I'm sure many of them could have been improved if I'd messed with settings, but I still think most of them were quite nice. (I'm usually with one or more other people so don't want to make them wait any longer than necessary if I see a shot I want to take)

 

[un hombre]

Hey guys, thanks for your input.

karamule, I am not saying that you will never have good pictures with default settings at night, but my theory and practice is, that they will never be realistic when your street lights are bright and not as dim, as your example picture. Notice, that on my pictures (The very first and fourth picture) in auto mode, the scene came very bright, in fact, too bright.
If I was to compare how it looked like in my bare eye, the result would be somewhere between the darker and the most dark scene...

You picture basically has a couple of small sources of light and the scene is dark, while in mine, there is many sources of strong light but it is night, in fact.

I think, that those are a bit different conditions.

 

[ilifecomputer]

Does anyone else notice that even when you get awesome night time lighting and color reproduction in your picture, you still never really get detail? I took some awesome night shots at Disneyland earlier today light and colorwise (some with custom settings) but man there is such lack of detail. I really hope they fix that soon. And, sure, everyone can argue that the camera is awesome but I don't think anyone has produced a really sharp looking picture yet.

My favorite phone so far? For sure. Super crummy camera? Check. I'll eat crow when this gets patched. Either the focus sucks nuts or something else is going on. But both me and my roomie have this phone, yadda yadda. Yea it's weak. Even the OP pictures look good but not like omg those are great pictures. They look like mine (glazed donut filter ftw!)

 

[un hombre]

Today's batch of new photos, really impressed with some.

I consider the best results for well lit streets to be ISO 100, Scene auto, exposure -1: https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=BFC945D85A86B14A!287&authkey=!ADaXq3KknPWBqSI

 

[sachinvermarip]

So what are recommended settings for low light shot?

 

[peachy001]

Bit of advice required please.... I am 99% sure that this has been answered in oher threads, in fact, I have read the answer elsewhere but cant remember it. My problem is he green tint that I get in my photos sometimes. How do I solve it?

 

[sakahn]

That's why we need an option to shoot raw. So that the exposure can be adjusted in the post-processing.

 

[un hombre]

If you have extremely low light conditions, you will probably need to choose "night shot" mode to have any detail on the picture.

The problem is, when you have night environment with lots of different light sources, like street lamps.
Night shot is not an option at this point, because pictures would become unnaturally bright.
Also, auto mode with default details does not usually do the job.

What I usually do with the phone in the last scenario, is I decrease exposure to a value between -2 and -1, and I also manually choose ISO to 100-200.

The truth is, that you have to experiment and see how your camera will produce in different presets and in different conditions.

Maybe this is meant to be a point and shoot like iPhone's camera, but I hardly ever use auto settings in night time photos. Day time is fine the way it is, although I do miss iPhone's sleek HDR :/