Quote:
Originally Posted by ddk632
Good advice.
One note on the long exposure: What I do at night, or dusk, is use a long exposure and then turn on the car lights (with the remote) for the last second or so of the exposure. Works for me. This is a trial and error process... 
The trick is, since lights are so bright, to have them turned on for only a small fraction of the total exposure (assuming you want the rest of the exposure to be exposed for the background, rest of the car, etc.)
Here's an example of the long exposure and lights at the end method I described:
Vicious Beauty by ddk632, on Flickr
Another way is a really short exposure (where the rest of the frame will be underexposed but your halos look nice and neat and not washed out) and then bring up shadows a lot. This will have the drawback of lots more noise than you may want, though, which I suspect will be an issue with the T3.
OP:
To answer your question on what area of photography, it's a bit tricky. Read Understanding Exposure by Brian Peterson to... Understand exposure
The short answer is it's not any one setting, because exposure is combined by ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. The issue for halos isn't picking the right setting or the correct exposure; it's dealing with extreme dynamic range (really bright headlights vs darker rest of the scene) which no camera can deal with without some trickery like flash with short exposure or the method I described. The idea is to even the exposure amongst the lights and the rest of the scene.
Finally, I am not a fan of taking two shots (one exposed for car, one exposed for halos) and then combining the layers. This is because it's extremely difficult to make it look natural. The lights will brighten up parts of the scene that aren't easily blended and the lighting can appear to be photoshopped ... Which it is.
Hope this is helpful |
Not sure why i never thought of turning them on at last second. Cool trick indeed.