Help with night shots on a Nikon D60

[jim_bob64]

Hi all, newbie photographer here.

Last night I tried taking some long(ish) exposure shots of the fireworks but could only get the camera to take a few shots as it kept displaying ‘subject too dark’ and would not take the picture which as you can imagine was very frustrating.

My camera is a Nikon D60 and I had fully manual settings so I expected the camera to take the shots whether it thinks there is enough light or not but it only seemed to take the shots when the firework had already exploded and had lit the sky up but by then I’ve missed the trails of the rocket.

I started off with f/10 set the shutter to 2 seconds but also tried 1 and 3 secs with f/5.6-f/11 but they all still gave the same message on screen and would not take the shot.

Is there anything I was doing wrong or not doing etc as now im going to have to wait a year before I can try it again as I really wanted to get some good shot.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Jim

[shotokan101]

Can't help with the technical issue Jim but you might want to preview your posts before posting - something looks very wrong with your post tagging to me

Jim

[jim_bob64]

Dont know what happened there but it should be ok now?

I forgot to mention I tried manual and auto focus as well to no avail

[shotokan101]

Thanks Jim - looking good now - I'm guessing that you prepared your post in another editor perhaps and then pasted here ?

Hopefully someone can give you an "answer" to your shooting problem soon

Jim

[dumpingdog]

Hi Jim
sorry if it's a bit late in the day to offer a reply (especially as this years bonfire night has come and gone), but I think I have the answer to your plight.
Try switching the AF off - I suspect the camera can't find anything to focus on while it's looking into the dark sky and is refusing to take the picture because of that not the lack of light - especially as you said it DID take the pic when the firework exploded - it suddenly found something to focus on!
My D60 did the same thing, but I remembered it also happened in normal daylight when the auto-focus tried to focus on a blank wall. Once I'd put something in view for it to focus on, it was fine.
Of course, you'll have to focus manually in the dark, but if you set the focus ring to infinity, you should be fine.
Hopefully you shouldn't have to wait until next bonfire night to try it out, people tend to set off fireworks to bring in the new year (providing you're not too sozzled to take piccies, that is!)

Good Luck!

Zyggy

[jim_bob64]

Thanks for the reply and PM.

Its hard to manually focus on something when its so dark but it doesn't appear to be a focusing problem as it did take some pictures out of focus but only when there was enough light.

Not really sure how to remedy this