File :-(, x, )
Anonymous
When I was driving on my way home, I saw a really awesome sunset. I just happened to have my camera and tripod with me, so I found a place to park and tried to find a good vantage point to take a picture. By the time I got there, it was already gone. I decided to try to take a picture of the town lights below, but it didn't really come out as I had expected... The sky, unexpectedly, became the central thing.

I took this with an aperture of around 15 or so, with a long exposure time (probably 30 seconds, my camera's max).

I like this picture and everything, but does anyone know how I could have gotten the town lights to show up better?
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Camera-Specific Properties:Camera SoftwareAdobe Photoshop CS2 WindowsImage-Specific Properties:Image OrientationTop, Left-HandHorizontal Resolution300 dpiVertical Resolution300 dpiImage Created2006:10:13 02:04:51Color Space InformationUncalibratedImage Width1764Image Height1157
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
This one was a little bit earlier, and a little further down the mountain. The town looks like crap, but the sky came out well; the opposite of my intention.

Camera-Specific Properties:Camera SoftwareAdobe Photoshop CS2 WindowsImage-Specific Properties:Image OrientationTop, Left-HandHorizontal Resolution300 dpiVertical Resolution300 dpiImage Created2006:10:13 02:04:57Color Space InformationUncalibratedImage Width1788Image Height1151
>> Anonymous
I'm assuming you have a DSLR since you said F15, but when your focusing on objects so far away you don't actually need to have such a small Apperature

Use something like F8-F11, and then that 30 seconds will pick up a lot more light. The problem is the sky is almost always too bright compared to the ground. SO you can use a trick called HDR to take multiple exposures and take the underexposed areas and overexposed areas of the best pics and make it look good.

so the trick is to underexpose the picture (I would call the first pic you took underexposed) then OVEREXPOSE quite dramatically the sky, so the town below shows up how you would have liked, Then in CS2 theres an option Merge to HDR.

Try that next time (Take approx 3-6 pics, all different exposures, start off underexposed and slowly overexpose them)