After dark photography
Get to grips with making exposures in the dark thanks to our expert insight
In the UK at least, now is the perfect time of year to indulge in some nocturnal photography. The shorter days and relatively mild weather means that shooting at night is a pleasure rather than a pain.
Naturally, exposures are much longer when light levels are low, which can make it harder to take sharp shots. It’s become something of a cliché to recommend a ’sturdy tripod’ for general photography, but it’s smart advice when it comes to photography at night. Exposure times can stretch for multiple seconds, even when the lens’s aperture is at its widest setting, and to combat that you’ll need to keep the camera rock-steady.
If your low-light exposures require shutter speeds longer than 30 seconds, you’ll have to switch to Bulb mode (see Setting up your camera, right) and use a lockable remote release to keep the shutter held open instead of setting a shutter speed. But how do you know how long that will take?
One technique is to switch to Aperture Priority mode temporarily, and increase the ISO one full stop at a time (double the ISO to do this, from ISO1600 to ISO3200, for example) until the shutter speed display stops flashing. How many stops did it take? Reset the ISO, switch back to Bulb mode and use that figure to work out by how many stops you need to slow the shutter speed. For instance, if it took an ISO increase of three stops, you’ll need to increase the shutter speed by three stops: 30 secs to 60 secs, 60 secs to 120 secs, 120 secs to 240 secs. So, in this case, you’d need to keep the shutter held open for four minutes at your original ISO.
It’s easy for street lights, illuminated buildings and other hotspots to become burned out during these sorts of exposure times, and even during much shorter exposures. So it’s a good idea to bracket your exposures – in other words, take a sequence of shots that are shorter than your main one. You can then combine shots and ‘paint in’ lost details later.
A large degree of trial an error is required for night photography, as the camera’s suggested exposure will be based on the metering system attempting to brighten up the scene, rather than a moody night scene, so we’ve suggested some starting exposures for subjects…