Explore the art of night photography
Don’t let the shorter days of winter get you down – there are plenty of subjects that look great when they’re captured in the glow of twilight…
Daylight hours might be in short supply at this time of year, but there are plenty of opportunities to get creative with your camera after dark. Night photography is a little more technically demanding, of course, but it does allow you to show the world in a whole new light (whether that’s from the moon, a street lamp or your camera flash).
The most challenging aspect of shooting at night is exposure. There are lots of elements to juggle in order to get sharp, clean images. The camera’s shutter may need to be open for multiple seconds rather than fractions of them, in order to record an image. When you’re exposing a photo in the dark, you have some options. If you’re shooting in a town or a city where there’s plenty of ambient light, you’ll probably be able to stick with a semi-automatic shooting mode, such as Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority or Program. You can also use Manual for full control; if the shutter speed required to make an exposure is 30 seconds or less, the camera’s light meter will continue to function.
Long exposure times can lead to blurred shots, though, which is why a tripod is always useful for this type of photography. It’s essential when you’re using very slow shutter speeds, either creatively or out of necessity, although it’s not a practical choice if you’re shooting in a busy location, where it could actually trip people up.
Your mileage may vary when it comes to getting
You’ll need to use a larger aperture or a higher ISO to increase the brightness
sharp results when you shoot handheld. Image-stabilised lenses and cameras can certainly give you an edge (particularly if you’re shivering in the cold!), but even then, you may be forced to make a few technical choices to achieve a shutter speed fast enough to freeze movement.
There are three exposure controls that you can change on your camera: aperture, shutter speed and ISO. To use a faster shutter speed (which reduces the brightness), you’ll need to set a larger aperture or a higher ISO to increase the brightness again. In some situations, you may need to adjust both.
Opening up the aperture by selecting a lower f-number (for example, going from f/8 to f/5.6) is usually the first step in unlocking a faster shutter speed at night. This is because picture quality degrades when you start to increase the ISO. That being said, the high-ISO performance of modern cameras is impressive, and you may only notice noise in your pictures when you magnify the image on a computer screen. Noise and colour shifts can be obvious at the upper reaches of your camera’s ISO settings, though, which can be made worse if you try and brighten the images later in editing software.
If you regularly shoot in Aperture Priority, you’ll be relying on the camera to set an appropriate shutter speed for the image, and it’s easy to miss that the shutter speed is becoming too slow. To avoid this, try setting your camera’s ISO to its Auto setting. This allows the camera to increase the ISO in order to maintain the shutter speed it determines is required for sharp handheld shots.
Another technical aspect to consider is the high level of contrast you can be faced with when you shoot at night. Changing the exposure settings can only get you so far when you’re faced with a scene that appears to have swathes of hard black shadows and bright sources of light.
You may have to expose for the highlights, in which case, the dark areas may lose all detail; or expose for the shadows, in which case, the brightest areas will be burned out and featureless. Alternatively, you can bracket your shots by taking photos of the same scene at different exposure levels, then blending them together in photo-editing software.
You can remedy this somewhat by starting to take pictures during what’s known as the ‘blue hour’, while there’s still some light and colour in the sky. The closer the exposure values of the sky and areas of your scene that are lit by artificial light are, the easier it will be to record a more balanced exposure.
As well as helping to solve a contrast problem, the twilight hue also adds visual interest, and provides a cool blue backdrop for any warm lighting in the scene.
Changing the exposure can only get you so far when you’re faced with swathes of shadows and bright lights
In order to capture the colours correctly, you may need to adjust the white balance setting. Your camera may interpret a coloured light like a street lamp as a colour cast that needs to be neutralised, so you might find that it tries to warm up an overall cool scene, or cool down a scene lit by warm lights.
When you’re faced with a scene that has multiple types of light sources or a particularly strongly coloured one, it’s best to set a custom white balance. Alternatively, if you shoot raw, you can choose one of the presets or leave it set to Auto, and correct the colour cast at your leisure when you process the image later.
As well as relying on the lighting in the scene, you can introduce your own. A flashgun provides more power and creative control than a built-in unit; paired with a wireless transmitter, it gives you the freedom to position the light at more interesting angles. Use your camera’s slow-sync flash setting to ensure you capture some of the ambient light in the background as well as the flash-lit subject – although you may need to support the camera with a tripod if you do so.
You can remedy this by taking pictures during the blue hour, while there’s still some colour in the sky