Trouble with sunsets and nighttime

RKaiguin

I'm back again with another question. I'm also interested in shooting sunsets, night skies, sunrises, and the likes. When using the recommended settings from the cheat cards, I get an error message saying that the lighting is poor, and my shutter won't work - I'm guessing due to the error message. I'm able to get a decent and clear focus, just no actual photo. I've tried with both my 55mm (which I realize is useless for sky shots) and my 200mm and got the same problem both times. Thoughts?

bruto

Actually, if you're getting a poor lighting message it should not stop the shutter. If the shutter will not click it is probably not focusing satisfactorily, even though it looks good enough on the screen, and even though it might be all right.

If you're taking a photograph with a fairly wide angle, such as with the 18-55mm, which actually should do pretty well, your best bet is probably to focus on some distant object such as a hill side or far building. At anywhere up to 55mm focal length and any aperture, any focus point past 50 feet should give you infinity as well. The further the better, but if you can manually focus (or single point AF) on something that far or further, it should fire.

Unfortunately the zooms will usually focus past infinity manually, and that is worse than falling a little short, so it's not too good an idea just to go on manual and focus all the way to the stop. But you can go on manual, and if there is nothing to aim at closer, focus to the stop, and then turn it back a tiny bit, and you'll be very close. In manual focus mode, the shutter will always fire, even if you leave the lens cap on!

RKaiguin

@bruto well, as it may turn out, I think it may be my camera. The shutter stopped working properly this weekend. Lots of phone calls for repairs will be made today.

If I continue to get the weird error message afterward, I'll definitely try those tips out. For now, I'm back to a P&S and my phone for a little bit.

Thank you, again for the tips!

bruto

Well, that's too bad, and I hope the problem is soon fixed. You probably will get the low light message again, as the camera warns without regard for whether you're using VR or a tripod, but you should be able to ignore it when you know what you're doing.