Oh dear! I meant too sharp. Still, it was getting late.

For my money it's too high key for a classic B&W film shot and two sharp and contrasty for a 60s photo (like this one for John).

Nice picture though.

See here:

Googling produces several police endorsements such as this one.

See here and here.

Thanks to all for further comments.

@mikeyscope, Yes, my understanding is that all this is being driven by a commitment to reduce energy consumption on pollution grounds. I know that on some main roads LED lights have already been introduced but I have yet to see these in action.

@andrewk, My Polaris meter will give EV readings. Initial experiments in our street gave very low/out of range readings in some spots which suggests it might be better to increase the ISO setting on the meter and then scale back for any conversion to lux. But hopefully the authority will already have such figures.

Many thanks to those who have made constructive comments.

Frankly I'm not happy about doing this, it really needs input from a street lighting engineer (apparently not available at present) with proper measuring kit and a professional photographer (too expensive as already explained), however I have said I will have a stab and see what happens. I will be explaining the limitations to my son-in-law very clearly.

Yes, Bob is quite right in saying the councillors should get out on site, doubtless some will have done but I suspect others will not.

I doubt they will know what they want to know. I suspect they will be looking for a general impression of how it would appear to the driver or pedestrian so will be looking for a combination of light level, evenness of light and colour (at least that's what I'd want to see). I think we are talking residential streets rather than main roads.

Yves' point about a tripod is completely taken. I don't have one as I'm not into that sort of photography, only a monopod, so I think I will get the best result in terms of steadiness by wedging myself against something solid - hence ISO 1600 (yes, I know all this is a Fred Karno approach).

Peter, Yves and Bob all make the point about not using AWB and I had been coming round to that when thinking of a set exposure in M to avoid the 'grey' result of automatic exposure. From what I can make out the color temperatures of the lights involved vary from 1700 to 5000+. I'm assuming the recommendations to use WB of around 5500 are made as this will best show colour variations. Is that correct?

On the light level front the best I can probably manage are EV readings underneath and midway between lamps which should give some indication of level and distribution.

My son-in-law works in our local Highways Department. He has asked me to take some pictures of areas with different types of experimental street lighting. He will use the pictures in a presentation to councillors who will be deciding which type(s) of lighting to use in future.

This is way outside my experience but apparently nobody in the department can do it and they can't afford to adopt my advice to use the in-house photographers.

As the objective is to allow comparison between the different systems any post-processing (apart from cropping and straightening) is obviously out.

I will be using a K10 with a 16-45 lens.

After thinking about it I came to the view that the best approach may be to use P mode at ISO 1600 with AWB.

Further thought showed one drawback to that is it would not allow comparison of different light levels so it might be better to use M mode and a standard exposure of perhaps 1/5 at f4.

Any advice about the best approach would be welcome.

This thread has reminded me that I have had about 20 rolls of 35mm film (mainly Fujichrome 100 PP I think plus some 400 and print) sitting in my freezer for four years or more. It will all be out of date - 2007 at a guess - but got frizzed well before its expiry date.

Is this likely to be of any value to anyone here? If so I'll put in an ad with details and see if we can raise a few bob for a local hospice.

Michael

That ignores the 'tan' which means below, so literally 'the big house below the pass'.