Had another church gig tonight (and continuing in the morning Sunday). An outdoors vespers service followed the inside church function. I knew the camera would have problems with auto focus in the dark so I did some homework ahead of time in the afternoon.

I went online and Googled hyperfocus calculator. I knew which lens I intended to use so I preselected three focal lengths I was likely to use and decided I would shoot everything at f/8. I ended up with an assortment of "focus spots" that would insure that everything from "real close" to infinity would be sharp. When I went outside tonight I switched to manual focus, made my setting and forgot about it. Worked like a charm I had the camera on aperture priority (f/8) and just let Nikon pick the shutter speed. The speeds produced ranger from 14 seconds to 25 seconds.

This was a pre-event shot I made just to see if "things looked right":

DSC_2811 RAW.jpg (111.68 KiB) Viewed 1047 times

When the service started, people were holding candles. I knew the long exposure would give me some motion blur but I was OK with that. I had hopes the resulting images would fit the mood of the service. I'm happy with what I got:

DSC_2826.jpg (144.9 KiB) Viewed 1048 times

I was shooting RAW + Jpeg Normal and was interested to see if I could find a significant difference in the images. Jpeg, as processed by the camera came out warmer...

DSC_2812 Jpeg.jpg (114.23 KiB) Viewed 1048 times

I'm not sure why that is. In ACR I did not make any WB adjustments at all, I left it "as shot"...

DSC_2812 RAW.jpg (150.39 KiB) Viewed 1047 times

I shot about half the service with available light and then turned the speedlight on. I'll be interested to see which ones the "website lady" uses. I think the available light shots are cool.

Rusty

Hey, great preparation and plan of attack! The shots look very cool to me. You'll have to let me know when they are up on the website.

Courtney

Those look great, Rusty. Wish I could do night shots as well as this

Rusty,
Looks like the planning paid off. I do like the warmer jpeg image. I have experimented with raw, but for most applications, I use jpeg. Looking forward to seeing more of these in your gallery.
Joe

Worked great Rusty! Pretty soon you won't need any auto settings!

Rusty, great planning and execution!

With respect to RAW vs. JPEG differences, it appears to me that the RAW image has lower saturation rather than significantly different white balance. That's not unusual; RAW images have no saturation boost performed in-camera, while the JPEG's usually do. There are settings in the Shooting Menu of your camera that control how much contrast, saturation, and sharpening are done to your images during JPEG creation; these settings don't apply to RAW images. Just a guess....

Rusty,

I think Chuck has it. ACR in and of itself does very little, unless you click on the auto button. None of the in-camera processing is applied, but all of it can be via the ACR module (if you have Lr or the full version of Photoshop) or can be filled out by Elements and other plugins.

Even the auto button only tweaks the basic exposure settings, not the white balance.

I almost always shoot RAW and my first tweaks to the image are always to play with the white balance settings - usually cycling through the range to see what happens. I am usually satisfied with one of the "presets" (Cloudy, Shade, etc) and rarely use a preset and then adjust the sliders further.

The results can be quite startling.

The point of shooting RAW is that the recorded image is much more pliable in terms of what you can do with it, not that it will match what you see as a jpeg. On a final comment, what you will see as a jpeg will depend on your camera settings - on my Canon, Faithful, Portrait, Landscape produce significantly different "versions" of jpeg images. To further muddy the waters, Adobe has introduced Camera Profiles that can be picked up by ACR and mimic the in camera settings. A whole new field to play in!

The look great, Rusty. You're a brave soul to do those night shots.

Ah, of course. I forgot all about saturation. The Jpeg is going to following my settings. While I knowingly left WB alone in ACR (as shot), I was also leaving saturation at "ACR Default". I reopened that same RAW image and, within ACR, started moving the saturation slider to the right from the default position of "zero".

I was watching the red car, Sure 'nuff, it started looking like the Jpeg image and the light spill from the luminaries got a lot warmer.

Thanks y'all for looking and commenting. Night shots are fun but a real adventure ... never quite sure what they are going to look like on the PC screen

Rusty

Rusty,

Yeah that is it, but more than saturation - Sharpening, Noise reduction - all of the incamera processes are turned off (or not processed).

So, without tweaking, you can wind up with a "Why did I bother to shoot RAW" issue.

The answer is, again, the raw image is a lot more flexible.

BTW, I didn't comment on but will now - lovely night time shots. In my very early film days, and when I learned the mechanics of cameras, I used the depth of field indication that was on every lens (maybe only applied on lenses that weren't zoom lenses. I found that when I switched to digital and then to my DSLR, that it was very difficult to evaluate in-camera what was going on with DOF - my camera has it but the problem is to evaluate it. (old eyes!)