Soooo... I borrowed a friend's flash (Canon 550EX) and while I was at the mall last night, I saw a Lotus Elise in the parking lot, so I took the opportunity and shot some photo's. My friend and I were playing with different settings, and this was probably the best shot out of 13... it's a bit blurry, I still need practice on hand-holding the slightly longer shots.

 

I'd driven one when I was in England visiting my dad. The car was awesome!
Handling was as good as the MINI but the power was somehow not linear enough to my taste, don't know whether it was related to its Toyota powerplant or not??
Would like to have it as my second car but it's almost impossible to get one here in Ontario
Still love my MCS. We've just bathed together
Cheers

 

In low light especially, you will get crisper shots with a tripod than you could achieve hand held. A tripod would also allow you to lengthen out the shutter time long enough to capture the scene with ambient light. Then you could decide if you needed to use a flash beyond that. I'm not sure how the digital Rebel flash system works, but at the least I would get a flash cable so you can get the flash off the hotshoe and off to the side. It will help avoid the flashy hotspots.

 

kilo, a tripod can do wonders, even just one of the cheap ones they have at best buy. It really helps with all pictures....not just low light ones.

 

Wow, waaay too close for comfort to that Hyundai. That woman looks like she's about to put her piece of crap in drive, have her phone ring, answer it, need to write something down, reach across for a pen, pull her foot off the gas, and...

 

Oh, YUMMY!!! What a gorgeous car! And yeah, the gal in that SUV is frighteningly close to the Elise! EEEEEEK!


Clover

 

One thing to consider, since I'm a guy that likes to travel light, almost any stationary object can become a tripod when you don't have one on you. A nearby parking meter can be used to rest the camera on while it's set to timer mode. A low wall, or the ground, or even yourself pressed tightly against a lamp pole. Look at whats around you whenever you're out shooting at night and see what can be used to get the shot!

Richard

 

I'm not positive, but I expect if you drove an English market car, it was not the 190 hp Toyota engine, but rather the significantly lower hp variety...

That said.. I'd LOVE to drive one How was the fit? And how tall are you?

 

Thanks for the tips guys...

Yeah, I thought about getting the tripod out, but I thought that may have been a little too conspicuous being that I was in a parking lot

Richard, I actually have this little mini folding tripod thing that has a long velcro strap built in so I can mount it to whatever the velcro fits around, it's cool!

Check it out: http://www.rei.com/online/store/Prod...cat=REI_SEARCH

 

Oh yes, those are very handy! Much more flexible than just putting the camera on the ground. Bean bags are also pretty useful. Not sure if you've seen them, but they allow for propping the camera in places that tripods or mini tripods couldn't be used.

 

The best thing for low light shooting is a fast lens. For the night shots my favorite is the 50mm/1.4. Hand shots are never an issue and I never use flash.

The kit lens with the Rebel is horrible in low light.

 

Now we are talking. Perhaps you're right. I'd driven it for 10 minutes on M5 & another few kms in the local twisties only, I didn't have a chance to check out the engine. I'll ask her about the engine when I have a chance.
The cockpit is way smaller than our MINIs. It is like sitting in an open-wheel, so narrow tight but the pedal positions are damn good. I'm only 5'7", so there is still room behind my seat.

 

Your WB is way off unfortunately.

Taking shots under lights like that is one of the things I despise the most because getting the WB right is a huge huge pain. You're best off shooting the shot in Raw mode and dealing with the WB settings later when you're at a computer, or bringing a white card with you so you can set a custom WB for each shot.

That and the tripod and fast lens will make for a much better night shooting setup.

 

Thanks for the comments Kyle...

Forgive my ignorance, but what's WB?

 

WB=White Balance

 

WB = white balance

It is denoted in degrees kelvin, usually between 2500k and 8000k or so.

Your camera will have different settings (direct sun, cloudy, incandecent, florecent). All of those settings are to indicate where on the scale "white" is given that different types of light produce a different hue of color.

So when you see a photo taken at night where the scene has a yellowish cast to it (the photo above for example), it should have been shot in incandecent mode or adjusted after the fact if you shot RAW to something approaching the incandecent light value on the scale. With RAW you can fine tune the white balance after the fact.

 

Couldn't have said it better, thanks!

 

Oh I see. Ok, so that makes sense, since it actually applies the white balance and stuff after the photo is taken right? ...which is why you'd want to shoot RAW and correct after. Sweet. Thanks!

 

Auto white balance usually works pretty well during the day, but at night, it is pretty poor. I generally wouldn't bother with white balance adjustment for daytime shooting, but for night time it's crititcal.

If you're shooting jpeg mode, to get the best results, you should go through the white balance options before you take the shot and pick the one that is most appropriate. It's best to do this before you take the shot since jpeg takes RAW camera data off the sensor, includes the white balance and other information, and then crams that into a file using a compression algorithm to get a smaller file size. You can still do some white balance adjustment after the fact in photoshop, but it's more of a pain than if you had just set the camera up correctly to begin with (especially if you take a lot of photos in those lighting conditions).

If you're shooting RAW, there is no need to fidget with it at the time you're shooting, since white balance information is processed into the RAW data after the fact. RAW also allows you to custom tune the white balance, so where the presets may be every 1000k or every 500k on the kelvin scale if you were shooting jpeg, if you shoot RAW you can fine tune down to 1k to get the white balance exactly the way you want it.