[Frameworks] Night shooting

[Scott Dorsey]

The short answer: shoot a test.

The long answer: 

If you point your reflected light meter at an emitted light source, the
exposure that it gives you is the value that gives you to make that light
source an "average gray" on the film (that is, the value of an average
scene).

So, if you got up close to a light and metered it with a reflected meter,
you'd get an exposure that would show you good detail in the light bulb
itself.  You could open maybe four more stops before the light bulb was 
Zone VIII white.  Then you could probably open another two stops more than
that if you were shooting color negative because of the compensation in
the negative stock.  

That's how you can estimate the point at which the highlights start to
block up and you start to lose color in the signs.  But this isn't all you
need to know from an artistic perspective.

The wider you open the lens, the more detail you'll lose in the signs
because the highlights will start to blow out and go white, BUT at the same
time you'll start to gain detail in the shadows, the parts of the buildings
and streets that are illuminated by the signs.  Maybe you want that.  If
it's wet you'll also get reflections off the streets which are only a stop
or two down from the original sources, but if it's dry the streets will be
comparatively dark.

So.... If this were 1990, I'd tell you to shoot a Polaroid and see what it
looks like.  But Polaroid pack film is not a common tool anymore.  If it
were 2010, I'd tell you to shoot it on consumer 35mm color negative film 
and take it to a minilab because the general shape of the curve is about 
the same and you'll get a sense of how much shadow and how much highlight
you get.  But there are no more one-hour corner minilabs.  

You could probably shoot with an adjustable digital camera... playing with
my wife's Canon DSLR, I think you'd be in the ballpark... I bet you could
get away with about a stop more exposure before blocking up compared with
the digital camera, but I don't think using the digital camera to preview
the look would be totally out of the question.

And if you're in Times Square or the Ginza, the ambient light will be at
a couple hundred footcandles... you can get plenty of detail in the street
without blocking the signs up because there are just so many signs that
the light from everywhere is bringing up the brightness of the street.
--scott