hey i know theres alot of photographers on the site... i was wondering how do you guys take those pictures at night and have just the headlights showing annd stuff like that? is it the camera or the editing? i have an olympus c-50 if that helps...

thanks

One thing that I find is absolutely essential for night shooting (on most cameras) is to have a tripod. No matter how steady you think you are ... there's going to be some shaking going on. Either a tripod or a real stable surface (retaining wall, inferior cars :), etc)

The other thing is that when taking the actual photos ... generally you'd want to set a timer or have a remote control ... for the reason that if you press the button, you may jolt the camera a bit causing you image to go wonky.

You might need to experiment with your camera settings but in general you'd want longer exposure times (duh) in the 2-3 second range for the effect that you want (over exposed headlights). ISO settings on a slower setting (higher the ISO's will get let you lower your exposure time but may turn out grainy). Depending on what kind of effect you want, you can play around with aperature size and exposure times.

Hope that helps.

Here's a website that's pretty good
http://www.schoolofphotography.com/night/night2.html#en

Don't know your Olympus, but if you don't have a "night" auto setting, try closing down the lens a couple of stops if you're able to control the aperture. (In other words, if your Olympus has a setting where you see something like this: + • • • o • • • —, adjust it a couple of dots down towards minus.) This will make everything darker so that all you see are pretty much the headlights.

that is a tricky question since you mention "only the headlights showing." Tha t makes it sound to me like the shot is underexposed, making most of the details of the car not clearly visibile. If you want to fool your camera into picking a quicker shutter speed (which will result in a darker picture) you can autofocus while pointing at a headlight, making the camera think that there's a strong light source. Apart from that, a tripod will be necessary for taking low-light pictures. That will allow you to keep the ISO setting low to reduce noise.

Before I got my SLR, I'd stop up - to about F8 or so - on my Canon S2 IS. I took a few decent night-shots using a railing, or bench, etc. On the S2 I couldn't jump my ISO past 50 w/o the image looking HORRIBLE. Another advantage is having the headlights go 'star point' at those F/Stops.

Here are a few night shots I think came out pretty good.
http://www.imagehostingsite.com/imagebackup/is.php?i=2440&img=glassmuseumthea.jpg

http://www.imagehostingsite.com/images/7160falls.jpg

This was taken close to an hour after sunset - 15? second exposure, IIRC

http://www.imagehostingsite.com/images/6060railcar.jpg

^amazing..

yes indeed it is amazing

dont have your headlights on. Have light on the car.

Here's a write up i did for another site. Goes over everything from day to night etc.

http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=347838