5D3 Low Light + Manual = Black Photos Please Help

[ReviewFever]

Below is a link to a Flickr gallery i just created and put in 4 low light examples and one daytime photo so you can see what i'm getting.  I will try my best to sum up my issues as succinctly as possible, but thank you in advance for any guidance.  I am more than happy to take advice and upload my results and respond regularly, but i need the help of more experienced photographers in order to learn where my problem exists... so far i'm thinking somewhere within the 12 inches behind the lcd screen.

😕

http://www.flickr.com/photos/95477213@N06/

I'm a super-noob when it comes to this camera... I know DSLRs but this is a leap for me, i learn fast, but need help.  Guidance and test and revise are readily accepted...

I just purchased a 5d3 and it is a huge step up from an old olympus evolt i purchased 9 years ago... I had gotten a hold of the camera well enough and needed a step up into a dslr that produced good video so after a VERY long time put into research i went with the 5d3. 

Well, sadly, I am quite disappointed with the results I am getting with low light and night shots.   After writing out about 11 pages of settings to use in manual mode to produce similar, wonderful shots -to online photogs-, I am getting nothing but black or dark and noisy shots.  Every time.  I have reproduced the exact shot styles and lighting doing research into footcandle information and seeking areas that are exactly the same as sample photos taken from a plethora of different sites online and different artists and I cannot duplicate anything nearly close to what I am seeing online. and even after putting my photos into lightroom 4.4 and manipulating them for a lot longer than i would like to, i still can only turn up with maybe a pile of grain.

so i will try to explain my issue very quickly.  -and by no means do i consider myself anywhere near a professional not even a knowledgeable novice-  i'm a beginner with this amount of depth and control, plain and simple, and this camera is WAY over my head at the moment, but what i can say is:t I learn expremely quickly and retain everything i learn much better than most people so even with a very steep learning curve, I know that with proper direction i will have this camera nearly mastered in few months...

and i am now fairly certain that the issue lies with myself as i must be overlooking something somewhere and i just started on the manual and am up to page 100ish but i havne't come across the fix yet...

i preface saying i want to shoot in manual mode, because i want complete control... but setting it into manual mode is NOT giving me complete control because the camera still is doing things on its own.

so my issue:  i set the iso, wb, +/-, and shutter speed as I want them and try to take a static shot of a rather dark area with very minimal lighting and as i depress the shutter half way the camera attempts to autofocus and while it does... (in live view to give me an idea of what's goin on) the screen immediately comes alive with colors and beautifully well lit images as it focuses and shows me a picture exactly as i want it taken and when i fully depress to capture the image i am left with MAYBE one highlight of the most well lit area and the rest is just black.  The gallery i linked to in the beginning of this post shows only a couple of the results of what i have going on.  in the street and desk with candle shot, -both cases- the camera at half depression of shutter release button while autofocusing lights up showing me an absolutely clear and beautiful picture and it locks focus, then, well you see the exact results. 

i dont understand why the liveview is showing me the picture as i hope it to be taken then giving me something that is absolutely unuseable.

i've tried in P mode and with minimal +/- adjustments I am ending up with very well lit night shots at a shutter speed around 1/200 or 1/400 but i can only seem to bring about a well lit image in manual mode with a shutter speed of maybe a half a second to an eighth of a second or even longer... but the clarity isn't there in many cases.

I can't understand why i set my camera to the same settings i am seeing other peoples' photographs which turn out very nice at night and in very dark areas and when i try i get utter junk...  the serial number's 6th digit is a 7, and it came to me with firmware 1.2.0 so i know it isn't an old model and i DID clear all the settings first as soon as i turned the camera on for the first time.  I fiddled with a few of the menu options, tried different settins for WB as well (custom, kelvin, automatic) in case it was a warmth issue which made no difference.  I think it's somewhere in the exposure value... but i am not sure...  as i go into that setting and move the dial it just either goes to one point in the middle or expands from both ends at the same time encompassing a larger area say -1 to +1  or -4 to +4 etc... though on the back of the camera when i select it using the Q menu option and adjust it there it doesnt give me a live view different scene showing a changed compensation.  On the top lcd it will still move itself around as i aim the lens toward a lighter or darker object even when on manual mode.  Even after fiddling with all the menu options and trying out different things i've gone back and reset the camera to default now 4 times and each time i reset it and then change the settings i still get shots that are all black and dark and grainy and noisy.   i put one daytime shot in the gallery to show that the lenses i'm using are picking up a lot of nice clarity in well-lit areas but for anything dark or even dark-ish, nada.

i have to be missing something somewhere... the settings i've tried most are (as many photos i saw which looked very nice on different blogs had these exact settings) :

ISO  ...  F/ ...   SS

  800   ...  6.4  ...  1/12          very dark

1600  ....  2.8  ...  1/60          black with one barely visible highlight  1/50  black  1/100 black

1600   ...   4     ...  1/200       black   1/60  black with one highlight

3200   ...  2.8   ...  1/1000     black with a pile of noise

and i went to the only camera shop anywhere near me (60 miles away) and explained my situatioin and received a little chuckle from the owner because i knew he was thinking i was over my head and i know at the moment i am, but once i learn a little more i know i will be proficient, i didnt spend almost $8000 on equipment with a thought that i couldnt learn this camera and all the lenses and balancing system.

He told me i had to try a moon shot at  ISO 400, F/ 16, and SS 400 then just step it down until i got a shot i liked but it's all just black or when stepped down to around 2.8 I'm getting a moon that looks like a yellow fuzz ball and a sky full of purple and white noise.

Currently i'm up to about 400 or so shutter actuations and i'd say that about 85% of them are of me failing to figure out how to get any good low light shots.  I live on a resort island and have a large amount of lighting types to pull from so if ANYONE out there is kind enough to give me some guidance or ask some questions that I can answer about my setup. Please, lend me your knowledge. 

Throw me a bunch of settings to try... give me some scenes to try to capture from stars to brightly lit amusement park rides to the pitch black of the ocean and dunes at night, just after sunset, or at sunrise.  I will do anything you guys can suggest.  Give me something similar to what you do and I would be very happy to correspond my settings to yours and see what i get and then upload my shots online for your critiquing and suggestions.  If i get the time this weekend, maybe sunday, i will try to make a recording using one of my phones and upload it onto youtube showing exactly what's going on and i can cycle through all of my menus so you can see what all the settings are, but i just reset them back to default once again and tried out another 50 or so shots at work taking photos of a cabinet under a desk and it's still just all junk. noisy and/or just black.... but as it focuses, well woo baby it does look so crystal clear and lively... then bam- capture of what looks like i left the lens cap on.  i will make this camera work, i just need a little guidance.

sorry for being SO long winded, but i had to explain everything in as much detail as i possibly could... and believe me, i could have made this easily three or four times longer.

thanks, very much...

jon

reviewfever

reviewfever@gmail.com

[ReviewFever]

I'm a super-noob when it comes to this camera... I know DSLRs but this is a leap for me, i learn fast, but need help.  Guidance and test and revise are readily accepted...

I just purchased a 5d3 and it is a huge step up from an old olympus evolt i purchased 9 years ago... I had gotten a hold of the camera well enough and needed a step up into a dslr that produced good video so after a VERY long time put into research i went with the 5d3. 

Well, sadly, I am quite disappointed with the results I am getting with low light and night shots.   After writing out about 11 pages of settings to use in manual mode to produce similar, wonderful shots -to online photogs-, I am getting nothing but black or dark and noisy shots.  Every time.  I have reproduced the exact shot styles and lighting doing research into footcandle information and seeking areas that are exactly the same as sample photos taken from a plethora of different sites online and different artists and I cannot duplicate anything nearly close to what I am seeing online. and even after putting my photos into lightroom 4.4 and manipulating them for a lot longer than i would like to, i still can only turn up with maybe a pile of grain.

so i will try to explain my issue very quickly.  -and by no means do i consider myself anywhere near a professional not even a knowledgeable novice-  i'm a beginner with this amount of depth and control, plain and simple, and this camera is WAY over my head at the moment, but what i can say is:t I learn expremely quickly and retain everything i learn much better than most people so even with a very steep learning curve, I know that with proper direction i will have this camera nearly mastered in few months...

and i am now fairly certain that the issue lies with myself as i must be overlooking something somewhere and i just started on the manual and am up to page 100ish but i havne't come across the fix yet...

i preface saying i want to shoot in manual mode, because i want complete control... but setting it into manual mode is NOT giving me complete control because the camera still is doing things on its own.

so my issue:  i set the iso, wb, +/-, and shutter speed as I want them and try to take a static shot of a rather dark area with very minimal lighting and as i depress the shutter half way the camera attempts to autofocus and while it does... (in live view to give me an idea of what's goin on) the screen immediately comes alive with colors and beautifully well lit images as it focuses and shows me a picture exactly as i want it taken and when i fully depress to capture the image i am left with MAYBE one highlight of the most well lit area and the rest is just black.  The gallery i linked to in the beginning of this post shows only a couple of the results of what i have going on.  in the street and desk with candle shot, -both cases- the camera at half depression of shutter release button while autofocusing lights up showing me an absolutely clear and beautiful picture and it locks focus, then, well you see the exact results. 

i dont understand why the liveview is showing me the picture as i hope it to be taken then giving me something that is absolutely unuseable.

i've tried in P mode and with minimal +/- adjustments I am ending up with very well lit night shots at a shutter speed around 1/200 or 1/400 but i can only seem to bring about a well lit image in manual mode with a shutter speed of maybe a half a second to an eighth of a second or even longer... but the clarity isn't there in many cases.

I can't understand why i set my camera to the same settings i am seeing other peoples' photographs which turn out very nice at night and in very dark areas and when i try i get utter junk...  the serial number's 6th digit is a 7, and it came to me with firmware 1.2.0 so i know it isn't an old model and i DID clear all the settings first as soon as i turned the camera on for the first time.  I fiddled with a few of the menu options, tried different settins for WB as well (custom, kelvin, automatic) in case it was a warmth issue which made no difference.  I think it's somewhere in the exposure value... but i am not sure...  as i go into that setting and move the dial it just either goes to one point in the middle or expands from both ends at the same time encompassing a larger area say -1 to +1  or -4 to +4 etc... though on the back of the camera when i select it using the Q menu option and adjust it there it doesnt give me a live view different scene showing a changed compensation.  On the top lcd it will still move itself around as i aim the lens toward a lighter or darker object even when on manual mode.  Even after fiddling with all the menu options and trying out different things i've gone back and reset the camera to default now 4 times and each time i reset it and then change the settings i still get shots that are all black and dark and grainy and noisy.   i put one daytime shot in the gallery to show that the lenses i'm using are picking up a lot of nice clarity in well-lit areas but for anything dark or even dark-ish, nada.

i have to be missing something somewhere... the settings i've tried most are (as many photos i saw which looked very nice on different blogs had these exact settings) :

ISO  ...  F/ ...   SS

  800   ...  6.4  ...  1/12          very dark

1600  ....  2.8  ...  1/60          black with one barely visible highlight  1/50  black  1/100 black

1600   ...   4     ...  1/200       black   1/60  black with one highlight

3200   ...  2.8   ...  1/1000     black with a pile of noise

and i went to the only camera shop anywhere near me (60 miles away) and explained my situatioin and received a little chuckle from the owner because i knew he was thinking i was over my head and i know at the moment i am, but once i learn a little more i know i will be proficient, i didnt spend almost $8000 on equipment with a thought that i couldnt learn this camera and all the lenses and balancing system.

He told me i had to try a moon shot at  ISO 400, F/ 16, and SS 400 then just step it down until i got a shot i liked but it's all just black or when stepped down to around 2.8 I'm getting a moon that looks like a yellow fuzz ball and a sky full of purple and white noise.

Currently i'm up to about 400 or so shutter actuations and i'd say that about 85% of them are of me failing to figure out how to get any good low light shots.  I live on a resort island and have a large amount of lighting types to pull from so if ANYONE out there is kind enough to give me some guidance or ask some questions that I can answer about my setup. Please, lend me your knowledge. 

Throw me a bunch of settings to try... give me some scenes to try to capture from stars to brightly lit amusement park rides to the pitch black of the ocean and dunes at night, just after sunset, or at sunrise.  I will do anything you guys can suggest.  Give me something similar to what you do and I would be very happy to correspond my settings to yours and see what i get and then upload my shots online for your critiquing and suggestions.  If i get the time this weekend, maybe sunday, i will try to make a recording using one of my phones and upload it onto youtube showing exactly what's going on and i can cycle through all of my menus so you can see what all the settings are, but i just reset them back to default once again and tried out another 50 or so shots at work taking photos of a cabinet under a desk and it's still just all junk. noisy and/or just black.... but as it focuses, well woo baby it does look so crystal clear and lively... then bam- capture of what looks like i left the lens cap on.  i will make this camera work, i just need a little guidance.

sorry for being SO long winded, but i had to explain everything in as much detail as i possibly could... and believe me, i could have made this easily three or four times longer.

thanks, very much...

jon

reviewfever

reviewfever@gmail.com

[ReviewFever]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/95477213@N06/8708640963/sizes/k/in/photostream/

that is a shot that i just took... it's in jpeg and is sadly too large for me to upload directly onto this forum thread.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH to everyone who contributed to my guidance.  I just went out and using the information that i learned over the past 2 days, I have successfully learned that I was the problem, not this fantastic camera.  I will still have a little tweaking to do for a long while, but as I take more photos, I will continue to get better.

i still have a pile of manual reading to do, but was so itchy to try a couple new techniques that I went out for a 5 mile walk at midnight and corrected the ignorance-induced mistakes previously committed.  I can't explain how happy I am right now and I am fairly certain that I will be getting a LOT of sleep tonight.  I will upload more photos as time goes on to my flickr if anyone wants to check them out and i will post a bunch into twitter (@reviewfever) if anyone wants to follow me, i'm not a twitter junkie, just started it, but I think some of my pictures i tweet will be worth people seeing.  Happily came across a photo i thought i had lost 6 years ago that i took being in the right place at the right time as a 17 year old girl parked her car onto a boat sitting on the street.  Yeah, sounds impossible, but the photo is def worth seeing.

[cicopo]

Now you're cookin'. There's even good detail in the area between the 2 houses all the way back to the house behind them. You can use many software programs to reduce the files for submission here.

[ebiggs1]

One thing I might add it, the Canon 5D Mk III manual will teach you how to use the camera but it won't teach you how to become a Photographer.

One other tip, is if you shoot night time sky photos, you will need to track the starts as your exposure gets longer. Otherwise you will get streaks instead of points. Also, when the Moon is way much brighter, you can make multiple exposures with different settings and stack them together in PS for instance.

Multiple exposure shots are a photographer friend. Learn Exposure Compensation!

[ScottyP]

OMG Cicopo! You mention the DOF but didn't mention that this is a photo of a car that has run over a boat somehow! :).

What do you do for a living, OP? Was this shot taken at your job? That is a crazy photo!

[cicopo]

Believe it or not I restore CORVETTES for a job. The photo he took last night is to be seen via the LINK provided. The photo here is an old one as per his text.

[ReviewFever]

how do you track the stars when using a longer exposure? i have an stx pro tripod, the action is smooth but i cant see how I would manually be sufficient enough to manipulate the camera over a 30+ second exposure to keep such sloe moving objects centered. is it a menu option?

as for the car photo, i actually took 3 shots of it but i know the other two are lost, one was from a block away the other was straight on and then the last you saw... i heard a crash while inside my house and, in my underwear, ran for my camera and door and darted outside. the first shot which i no longer have had a woman walking her dog with quite a disgusting look on her face couldnt tell if it was the thought of a man running toward her in underpants taking a photo, but i couldnt think there was a flying purple people eater behind me causing such a reaction. lol.

im very much looking forward to learning the proper use of exposure compensation and multiple exposures... and now that i have the ability.to get better low light shots... HDR photos... which will make my real estate videos pop more when they have a more dynamic accompanying header photo.

thanks again everyone for the encouragement and direction. i cant begin to describe just how much better i feel knowing how to compose a shot better.

[ScottyP]

You would not track the stars. For a short exposure like 30 seconds or one minute they would not appear to move at all. If you wanted to do a long exposure, like half an hour or two hours, you would simply let the stars form a circle of streaks in the sky.

[ebiggs1]

 For a short exposure like 30 seconds or one minute they would not appear to move at all.

Well maybe, maybe not, It is more complicated than just stating that a certain exposure will not produce trails.

The 500 Rule:

You can divide the focal length of your lens by 500 which = the longest exposure before stars start to trail or blur. The answer is in seconds.

It also matters what body you are using. Keep that in mind, too.

For example; let's say your taking a shot with a 24mm lens on a 5D Mk III.

500 / 24 = 21 seconds, which you can round to 20 seconds.

This is as long as you can expose the stars before they are no longer points of light.

You can see as the focal length gets longer the time factor becomes very much shorter.

Than, again, it also depends on the use of the final print. Star photography is very complicated and one of the toughest, time consuming subjects you will encounter.

[ReviewFever]

Well I've spent a little time working with the camera and I can happily say that I am becoming more knowledgeable and practiced as time progresses.  I am getting some amazing low light shots and am very happy with the results.

Thanks again to everyone for their help and guidance.  I am elated to report that I was the malfunction, ha.  Here are a couple photos I've taken over the past couple weeks:

noticeable post work in Lightroom 4.4, but the RAW images gave me so much with which to work.

Thanks again for all of your help.

-J

[cicopo]

Nice to know you're getting the results you needed. Once you understand what it takes things fall into place nicely.