urban night photography

introduction

photographing urban city lights adds an extra bonus to your travel photography
shooting about 10-25 minutes after sunset will give your cloudless sky a nice deep blue
shooting when the full moon is up and behind you will help to fill in the shadows a bit

for best image quality, you need a sturdy tripod, lowest ISO, medium apertures (eg. f/8) for adequate sharpness and depth of field (DOF), and this results in long exposures such as:
- ISO 200, f/8, 10-20 seconds
you should consider bracketing your exposures +/- 0.5 EV, of you can do a full HDR bracket (eg. 3 shot +/- 1EV, 5 shot +/- 2EV in total)
make sure you have focus on infinity if you have no important close subjects, otherwise consider focusing on the hyperfocal distance for that set up.

if you are lucky enough to have a Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera with a Olympus m.ZD 12mm f/2.0 lens then you CAN get reasonable wide angle hand held shots at the following settings
- ISO 800, f/2.0 and 1/4 second with the 5EV image stabiliser activated
  - you may be able to do a very carefully held 1/2 second and 1/8th second shot for HDR work as well
if you have a full frame dSLR with a 24mm f/1.4 lens, you are going to have trouble as you will need:
- ISO 3200, f/1.4 and ~1/30sec - it is possible but very shallow DOF which will be very annoying, and you will need to hold it very steady.
- note that unlike mirrorless camera systems, dSLRs have mirror lock up to contend with:
  - Mirror lock-up can drastically increase sharpness for exposure times comparable to the settling time of the mirror (~1/30 to 2 seconds)