LIGHT THE WAY
Using torches or additional lighting allows you to bring out detail in foreground objects
Photographing landscapes at night can be very tricky because of the tiny amounts of light that your camera is working with. Away from towns and cities, the countryside around us becomes very dark at night, and you either need to push your camera up to extreme exposure times and sensitivities, or utilise additional lighting in the scene. This is where a handheld LED torch can come in useful, not only to light the way when you are walking to your location, but also to light it up for the camera when you get there!
A fairly inexpensive torch, with a focusable front lens, can be picked up for less than £50 and allows you to ‘paint’ light onto foreground objects, or even draw objects or letters in mid-air if the camera is pointing towards you. This technique is known as light painting, and takes a good amount of practice before you become proficient with the technique.
Obtaining a torch with a focusable beam is key, in order to control where the beam of light will shine. Too wide a beam will scatter too much light, lighting up the whole scene rather than the parts you want it to.
Even when working with relatively long exposure times, you still don’t have much time to light up the scene how you want it. It usually takes many attempts to get the lighting right across the whole of the image, and you have to be considerate of other photographers. If you do bump into another photographer at night, explain what you’re planning to do and make sure they’ve finished taking their shots, or take it in turns to produce images.
The light that an LED torch produces will probably be quite cool in colour temperature, compared to the rest of the scene. Shooting in RAW format means that you can even out the colour temperatures in different parts of the image, using local adjustments in Adobe Lightroom. You can also consider getting coloured filters for the front of the torch, to balance the colour temperature or create light with unusual and unnatural colours.