Balancing light (sunrise/city lights)

[Tina G]

I need to take a picture to balance the light from the city buildings with the sunrise. Are there any helpful hints to capture the moment that the light is balanced?
Thanks
Tina

[Rory_5244]

Uh, double exposure perhaps. One exposure for the buildings at night, and then one for the sunrise. Or you can combine two different exposures digitally. Or you can use a GND filter. In any case, building lights may not show up too well as the building exteriors are illuminated by the very bright sun. A picture at dawn or dusk may be better.

[Kirk Gittings]

The light you refer to almost never balances. Sunrise comes too late to balance with building lights just as sunset comes to early. We usually end up doing what we call "twilight" shots before sunrise or after sunset. See my site and the image below. That was taken about half an hour after sunset. The only way to do what you want really is to do a double exposure, once well before sunrise for the building lights and another as the sunrise happens. A GND filter is not a great idea because the light from building light to sunrise will vary by up to 6-8 stops. It is possible to do this digitally too with two separate exposures and blend them in PS, but each exposure must be done right. Also the camera needs to remain absolutely steady and the focus and aperture needs to remain constant. Vary exposures with the shutter speed only set on T or B. You will probably have to "scout" the exposures by testing them before hand separately and bracketing to find the right exposure for each.

[Jack Flesher]

What Kirk said.

Here is a sunset version timed as closely as possible for a single capture with the Betterlight scanning back. It's still 2000 pix wide (to show the detail) so I link to it: http://web1.omniblog.com/_smartsite/...1vJmlkPTYxNDY=

[Greg Lockrey]

All the above and you might try a color compesating filter for the lights if you are shooting daylight film. Then remove it for the second "daylight" shot. Your double exposures will have to be spot on if you are using film with no camera movement and perfect exposure both times. Digitally would be a better technique because you could assemble everything in PS.