How to shoot night HDR (photography)?
Recently I wanted to try night hdr. But turn out so grainy. I always have my ISO on 100 but the tone mapping is how it gets it grainy or muddy looking. If I want to shoot this water fountain tonight and want to HDR it how could I get a smooth night HDR? Do I shoot 3 RAW or should I try like 6-9 RAW and combine them all? I'm not really familer with night HDR. Please help! Thank you all.
BTW I own a Nikon D3100 and there's no BKT auto So it's all manual. Which I'm totally fine with but can you guys give me sometimes/exposures I should use? There's colored lights in the fountain that change and yellow street lamps.
Don't shoot it at night, not all of it anyway. You need to scout the location so you can get some light readings. Shoot at dusk, start just before the street lights come on. Take a shot then, one after they're on and one when the fountain lights are bright. Fill in with as many shots as you want, and don't be afraid to use ISO 200 or even 400 for the night shots. The biggest problem you will have is controlling any dynamic elements like sky, vehicles and people. If you can, get Noise Ninja too.
You didn't say how you were making the HDR conversion, I would use Photoshop and handle any tone mapping issues on each individual shot before combining them.
You have live view right? And with live view you can see the exposure change when you adjust the shutter speed right? If that's the case then you'd simply turn on live view, look in your darkest details that you want to show up and adjust until you can see them. Then look at your brightest detail that you want to show up and adjust the shutter speed until you can see it. Then when you shoot you bracket (manually) between the two. The limitation with that is that the live preview is your lens wide open and your video system's slowest "shutter speed" for filming video, coupled with your highest ISO. I use a much older camera and you get to a certain point and the live preview won't get any brighter since there's no higher to go with the ISO.
The alternative method is to zoom in on a shadow, half press the shutter button and take a reading. Zoom in on a highlight and take another reading. Then you'd go from one point to the other.
When I bracket I usually shoot at one stop intervals. When you're shooting with a light source that's close to something and that light source drops off fast (i.e. Any light fixture that's mounted to a wall) you get rings around the light if you don't have enough information for the program to use. If you don't have something like that in your scene then 3 stop intervals would work. The number of shots depends on the range that you're shooting. There's no hard and fast rule of 3 or 9 shots. It just is what it is.
As for the noise, if you're using Photomatix you can set the program to adjust noise for just the underexposed images or all of them. You can also set the strength. Also tone mapping will exaggerate the problem. If the program you're using doesn't have a setting for eliminating noise then you could always process your RAWs first to 16 bit Tiffs and take the noise (and any Chromatic Aberrations or CA) out at that time.