Black and White Photography Help!!!! Is it at all possible to...?

Question

...take a photo of a city scene taken during the day,

and burn it so much to look as if it were taken at night?

...or would too much detail be lost / too hard to do convincingly?

heellllppp!!! lol thankyou so much for any help!

Answer 1

you would have to over expose the sky to burn it in without overexposing the buildings.

It takes practice to do. I think it's called dodging. You let the image expose and block the light from burning the paper where you don't want to overexpose. In your case, you'd want to block the light where the buildings are while the sky burns in. Then let the buildings expose. You will have to work with it to get the right comination of the essentially 2 exposure times.

Answer 2

To do this convincingly you need shadows from street lights, window light, etc. which are almost impossible to create yourself. These shadows have to be stronger than the shadows from the sky (sun) lighting or people instinctively feel that something is wrong when they look at the picture.

You may be able to simulate it well enough to get by if you take the daytime photo on a cloudy day so there are no strong shadows at building edges from the sun. If there is no sky in your photo use a blue filter to simulate the shading from a night time scene (use an orange or red filter instead to darken the sky if it's visible in the photo), and print the final photo slightly underexposed (darker than normal).

Taking the photo as near to dawn or dusk as possible so some building lights are visible will help.

(I'm the Educational Coordinator for my camera club.)

Answer 3

in color motion picture film, shooting "day for night" means using a dark blue filter. however to be convincing, there has to be lights on as if it were night, ie street lights, car lights, window lights. sun shadows are distracting, an overcast day works best.

in black and white, the blue filter does nothing. your best bet is to use a yellow filter as this at least will turn the sky very dark. clouds will still come out white, so a cloudless day is required.

to be convincing, it should be early or late in the day so that lights are on, and sun shadows are at a very low angle

Answer 4

if this is done with digital, you can mess with it and probably get what you want. What I would do would be to take your picture in black and white and then make it into a negative and print that.

In film photography, you can get a paper that will print the negative, as is, and thus reverse your picture. I can't remember the paper number or what it is called, I have not done dark room work for a while.

Answer 5

Use blue filter of various density as per light intensity or polarizing filter at the time of snap.

If Digital camera then immense possibilities to play with the image, yhrough photoshop, your imagination is the limit.