Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Basic night photography



This is a follow up on night photography, the previous being nightscapes with star filled sky's. In this blog I cover the basic principles of night photography.

Cityscape was taken in Dubai
Cathedral was taken in San Jorge, Argentina
Chapel (late 1800's) was taken in Argentina, Santa Fe
Fireworks was taken in Sun City, South Africa


Due to the fact that you are dealing with so many variables when shooting at night, every situation calls for specific settings. however,  before we even get to the settings the two most obvious necessities would be shooting in RAW (if camera compatible), and the other would be shooting on tripod. Shooting in RAW is extremely helpful when shooting at night, you can adjust the exposure and white-balance without negatively affecting the image for instance, whereas the tripod will steady the camera. Due to the low light and slower shutter you can not afford any movement as your image will end up blurred.

If you do not have a remote trigger, you can always use your timer (2 sec. delay), avoiding touching the camera which could result in slight movement.

I suggest shooting in Manual mode as it allows for the best combination of aperture (narrow aperture) and shutter (slow) speed. Generally your shutter can vary between 2 sec. up to 1/30 depending on the amount of light available. For example, in Dubai the city was lit up in the distance, so a 1/15 shutter was more than enough. Getting the start burst in the Chapel photograph required an aperture between f11 or f16, the more narrow the aperture, the better star burst.

When it comes to the nightscapes with plenty light fills, your ISO can be 100/200. This is ideal for retaining perfect sharp images. Unlike the indoor / hand held / performance where you need to bump your ISO up to 1600 at times for because you need a faster shutter to get clear images.

Remember you are shooting digital, so play with your stops, if the image is too light/dark, adjust your aperture 1 / 2 stops up or down.

Finally, time your shots; for instance while photographing the chapel I needed some extra light on the road, so I timed it just right that a car would be the approximate right distance from me as the shutter went off, with a 1/15 shutter delay; after a couple of tries it worked.

In the other instance you could have a little nature luck on your side. During the fireworks photograph there was a split moment with an electrical cloud burst just at the right moment when the shutter went of, lighting up the sky for a beautiful effect.

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