Re: Tips on taking better night photos

You're going to run into problems with long exposures. Forget about
hand-held photos at long exposures. Even if you have a tripod, only a
"still life" will be possible without motion-blurs. The worst-case
scenario is an image where part of the photo is properly exposed and the
rest is underexposed. Not many people can afford to spring for a camera
that's noise-free at ISO 3200 and/or get a super-powerful flash. I'd
suggest selecting shutter-priority and set an exposure length that won't
allow blurs. Then enhance the image after-the-fact on your computer.

By sheer co-incidence, I've just gotten a "proof-of-concept"
enhancement program functioning, for salvaging under-exposed photos.
See http://www.pbase.com/waltdnes/enhancements for a worst-case scenario
and what I could salvage out of it. I used Image-Magick and FreeBasic,
compiling a program I wrote, to do it. If you've followed this group
recently, you'll probably be aware of my unhappiness with my FZ5's
low-light "performance" (or lack thereof). I got pissed-off enough that
I went and did something about it.

If anybody is interested, my code works on linux and should also work
on Windows. For further details download my discussion notes at
http://www.waltdnes.org/photostuff/pmod.txt and the (FreeBasic) source
code at http://www.waltdnes.org/photostuff/pmod.bas

I realize that my approach is clumsy and heavy-handed, but it's at the
limits of my programming ability as it is. I've posted on the gimp
newsgroup and the ImageMagick mailing list and pointed people at the
code. Hopefully, someone who's a better programmer than me will
implement these algorithms in one or both of these programs.

--
Walter Dnes; my email address is *ALMOST* like wzaltdnes@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Delete the "z" to get my real address. If that gets blocked, follow
the instructions at the end of the 550 message.
.

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