When looking at HDR photography, I often found the night photos to be the most impressive. Well, I recently did it for the first time. It is way cool, but there are a few oddities compared to doing it in the daytime to watch out for.

My biggest suggestion is to use live view and manual exposure. With the 5dII at least, the camera I was using. If you dial in a lot of exposure compensation for your base exposure it sort of squeezes the range it can shoot in the Auto Exposure Bracketing sequence. Shooting manual does away with this problem. So I set a manual exposure using exposure simulation in live view. I set the f/stop to f/16 and adjusted the shutter speed to fit as much of the values into one histogram as I could. I then set the sequence to two stops each over and under.

The other oddity here is that the shutter speeds are so long, that it’s hard to keep track of where you are in the sequence, etc. I had a moment when I thought my camera was malfunctioning, when all that was wrong was I had locked the button of my release down.

In post processing I loaded the images into Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. Can’t tell you a whole lot more as I processed each image differently.

Give this night HDR thing a try, the results are wonderful.