help with night photograph

bovril

Hi,

I took the following photograph on monday night with Canon 350D and the following settings
Exposure: 6 sec (6)
Aperture: f/22
Focal Length: 17 mm
ISO Speed: 200

http://static.flickr.com/116/310119812_0e07fea148_b.jpg

http://static.flickr.com/117/310119894_eaefb94599_b.jpg

First one has white balance changed to tungsten and 2nd one I made black and white in photoshop with the original white balance.

The light in the top centre is very bright and has made flares(?) on the photo. It's more visible in the colour version. Is there any way of avoiding this when taking photos at night with bright lights in them?

Many thanks
B

Roen

Did you have a filter on the lens?

bovril

yes a UV one.

Roen

I'd shoot it again without one and see what it turns out like. Providing you get the weather!

bovril

cheers will try

5uspect

I assume you shot in RAW if you changed the white balance between versions?
Maybe look at exposure bracketing and then performing a HDR merge of your shots to get the optimum balance between the super bright lights and the very dark areas.

There is a thread over in the digital darkroom about creating a HDR shot from a RAW file by merging shots with different RAW exposure settings, I'm a bit skeptical about it but it might get you the effect your after.

Also a bit of fiddling with the shadow/highlight setting in the image>adjustment menu can be useful. Also try applying an adjustment layer such as levels and playing witha gradient on the layer mask it creates to only apply the adjustment to the bright lights.

B0rG

somebody needs to clean the lens
for me this looks like little dust particles reflecting light.