Night Photography

I think I am in the mood for a little night photography session tonight. I get in this kind of a mood quite a lot because there are so many things that I love about night photography. The images are just one factor that plays into my fascination with this type of photography. Shooting at night can be very peaceful. You can have a lot of time to consider your composition and exposure and with a little experience you can shoot some amazing images. In this article I will share with you some more of the reasons why I love night photography and share some of the things I have learned about shooting at night with you.

I love night photography because of the somewhat unexpected results you can get. Your camera will pick up things that your eye might miss. Shooting at night requires a small bit of equipment that you may already have in your bag. If not it shouldn’t be too expensive to get your hands on it. First of all your camera needs to be able to keep it’s shutter open for at the very least 30 seconds. My camera has a shutter lock that will allow me to keep it open for about 30 minutes. Having the ability to leave the shutter of your camera open for longer means more light will hit the sensor or film giving you a better exposure. You of course need a tripod and it is nice to have a shutter release cord with a lock. This is a little remote control that attaches to your camera that allows you to release the shutter without touching the camera. From here on out I am going to assume that you have all the necessary equipment and have at lease some experience shooting in low light situations. I would like to focus this on shooting techniques that can take a composition and make it a great photograph.

Ok, so we have all our gear and were at our location. I particurlarly like shooting at night in the industrial part of town. It might not be the safest place to shoot but it sure is interesting. This brings up a point that I need to touch on. It ofter really helps to bring another person along with you on night shoots. You can never be too careful.

When setting up for your shot after you have composed it in-camera take a look at your settings. I shoot at a fairly small aperture, around f/11 to f/22. The smaller the aperture the more detail you will get in your images especially at night. In turn this will make it necessary for you to take a longer exposure. The image above was taken at f/11 and exposed for 30 seconds with the ISO set at 100. I often bracket the exposures. I like to create HDR images with 3 or 4 images. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and what you do is take 3 or more differently exposed images with the same composition and merge them together. If you would like to check out some really great examples of HDR photography Flickr has a HDR group with tons of great images. I will write a tutorial about this in the future but for now I am going to keep on the subject of night shooting. Basically I try to shoot the lowest ISO and F-stop I can. This will give you the most detail but will also take more time. I tend to try to shoot away from direct light as well but I think that is more a personal preference.

When going out to shoot at night I try to leave just before sundown. I love to get that deep blue sky that occurs just after the sun goes down. leaving a little early can ensure that you get to your location and still have time to set up before the light is perfect. Night photography is really just a trial and error kind of thing. Getting the right exposure is difficult because it is really a bit of a guessing game. Since the advent of the digital SLR night photography has become a lot less expensive for me. I shoot a lot of images and weed out the ones that are no good. This was expensive when I shot film exclusively. My advise is to shoot a lot of images. Take 3 or 4 of the same composition just changing the shutter speed. Your camera should keep track of the meta data for each image but if it doesn’t jot it down on a note pad to keep track of what worked and what didn’t. Most of all, have fun.