Hi Steve,

Two long-exposure tips:

1. Cover your view-finder, since light can leak in the back door this way. Some cameras come with a buit-in switch-activated cover, and some supply a little plastic cover that clips on or is part of the neck strap.

2. Remove all filters and/or use a fixed focal length (non-zoom) lens to reduce the possibility of internal reflections from bright lights.

Regards,
Charlie

Charlie,

You're a godsend. I didn't have the viewfinder covered, and almost certainly lights from the basement (where there's a sliding-glass door walk-out) leaked in through it.

I was going half mad, because the flare didn't line up with any of the city lights. In fact, it all looked suspiciously like our outdoor and basement lighting. But I coudln't figure out how lights over my shoulder got in front of the lens.

Now I know.

Thanks!

I took a color slide photography course in night school at the local community college 20 years or so ago. The instructor was a nighttime cityscape and architectural specialist.

Balancing the sky, the background, and light sources in the picture is hard. Normally when you have light sources in the picture that you can control, you expose for the rest of the picture, and then turn on and off the light sources you control to reduce their exposure, e.g., you can unplug the illuminated Coke machine for half the exposure, or turn the shop's lights off for half the exposure, or in the opposite direction, you can "paint" the scene by walking around with an electronic flash during the exposure (being careful not to stand between the light and the camera).

Of course, normally you don't have this control. So the key is to shoot at the precise time between day and night, i.e. dusk, when the balance is right between the sky, the buildings, and the lights. Obviously, you can only take 2 or 3 frames a day using this approach, but that's the way this photographer did it. Computing all this stuff out is a headache. And on slide film there was zero room for mistakes, since in the old days the slides went right on the drum scanner and came out as separations to be stripped up for printing. Nowadays maybe you can fix things a bit in Photoshop.

I'm not sure of the mechanics of it, but I asked of Photo-god friend of mine similar questions a while back. Here's his answer - with all the useful detail forgotten :(

Take two pictures (since you have the tripod set up anyway, they'll line up). One with a good exposure on the lights. One with a good exposure on the sky. Use Photoshop (or the Gimp) to take out the "bad" part of each one. Then overlay them. Tada! Perfect exposure on both parts.

The tricky bit: the "taking out" process. It has something to do with color selection and histograms, but I don't remember just what.

Never dismiss dumb luck. The best nightime exposure I ever took was in Hong Kong, when I staggered out of a tavern, rounded a corner, a saw a perfect alignment of neon signage, automobiles, and other lights framed in a narrow Hong Kong streetscape. I had no tripod, of course, so I fumbled my Nikon out of my bag, rested it on a mailbox, and guessed with the shutter speed on my last two exposures. One came out perfectly, and now hangs framed in my office.

In short, I recommend excessive consumption of Guinness Stout to achieve photographic excellence.

I disagree with you on your basement-lights theory, although leakage like this is possible. This looks like classic lens flare; the bright city lights appear as dim ghosts directly opposite the image center (i.e., as if the image were rotated 180° around its center). Most of the bright lights near the center of the image (about the middle third) have matching ghosts. You can see this by opening two copies of the image in Paint, inverting one, and flipping between them. (The inverted image needs to be moved about 2 pixels right and 17 pixels down to match properly.)

Flare is usually caused by reflections among the lens elements--one explanation here: http://www.vanwalree.com/optics/flare.html. Taking off filters (as already recommended) is a good idea

I've always found timing to be everything in really good cityscape shots at night.
I get the best results when there still is a measure of ambient light available, but when it is dark enough for lights to be seen.
The window of opportunity is small, but bracketing exposures and time helps.

Steve,

The hot spots in the dark foreground are certainly coming in from the viewfinder. They don't line up with any hot spot lights from the taking angle.

Here's the trick for balancing foreground to background: graduated neutral density filters. They come in hard and soft gradations. For this shot you'd want hard to have a "quick" transition from what you want to underexpose because it's too bright, to what you need more exposure of because it's too dim. Look at Lee filters website for appropriate filters, adapters, etc. Cokin has similar, but I prefer Lee for various reasons. Buy the big ones, 100mm, so you could use them for MF as well as 35mm.

They also have "grads" in colors to accent sunsets/sunrises and other shots.

Don't worry about them being "plastic". By the time you've munged one up enough to be an optical problem, you will have gotten your money's worth. Just buy a replacement and smile when you see the pics the old one produced.

BTW, using grads is a lot easier than photoshopping two or more pics. With the grads, you get to see pretty much what it will look like and can adjust the position of the grad while you're shooting for the effect you like.

Some of the visualization is by experience because our human eyes are so much more versatile than film (we have a much better contrast ratio). But it soon becomes a natural touch with experience. Which is why photography is an art, not a technology.

All the best; keep shooting!

No help, but gee it must be nice to see those mountains.