Update to: Any tips on for better long-exposure night photos?

[Todd's keyboard]

A few weeks back you all shared some advice on how to take better low-light photos.

I didn't even know that mirrors could be locked. So, first thanks for that tip.

One night after that I set the camera to Aperture Priority (f-stop 8) and took several shots at different ISO settings. The camera allowed far too much time for each exposure with blurry results.

On a subsequent evening, I went full manual. The f-stop was still 8, but I took multiple shots with different time exposures. I started at 5 seconds, then decreased the time. I think the fastest was 1/60 of a second.

I went through that cycle with ISO 100, 200, and 400.

These images turned out much better. I like the crispness of the lights with the black background in one image (1/2 second exposure), and the sky and clouds in the other image (5 second exposure).

The next step is to figure out how to combine these two images in Photoshop.

thanks again, Todd's still-learning board

https://forums.macresource.com/file.php?...ground.png

https://forums.macresource.com/file.php?...ground.png

[Ombligo]

Quick and simple way to combine them -- Put the sharp one down as a background layer, place the second down as the top layer [set the opacity to about half to get it positioned directly over the first one, then raise it back to normal], finally use the eraser to remove just the tree from the top layer in order to see the better second layer.

done