Right, I have been shooting low light and night photography for a while. I like it because I am in charge of the light. This is one reason why a lot of people are really afraid of it or are not interested in it. When I say low light, I don’t mean sunset, I mean PAST sunset and pitch black night.
I think the majority of newcomers to the SLR market make a terrible and fundamentally wrong assumptions when it comes to night photography: it takes years of practice and you need professional equipment to take great pictures.
Well, you are wrong on both accounts.
I mentioned that I like to be in control of the light. Imagine night photography as a black canvas and YOU decide what will be on it.The same aperture rules apply at night as they do during the day but one new factor comes in: Long exposure. Long exposure is not just close to a second, it’s more like 15-30 or more seconds. Yes you will need a tripod or somewhere where your camera will be steady for the amount of seconds you need it to.
Back to the canvas. Remember all these awesome pictures of water becoming milky and blurred while everything else was sharp? Here is why: You leave the shutter open for an amount of time, EVERY movement is recorded. So, if you leave the shutter open for 1 second all the water that flows for one second is recorded, which is what makes it blurry, because it MOVES. Now the exact same applies to LIGHT at night or in darkness. ALL light is recorded. That means if you have a black room and you take a flashlight and make circles and you leave the shutter open for 6 seconds, you will have all the circles in the image that you drew in 6 seconds. THAT is how these awesome light photos are done in principal. Of course there is tricks and advanced things to it but it is always the same principle: Make the aperture as small as possible (F9 or more) , lower the ISO to 100 or less and leave the shutter open for more than 30 seconds. That will allow you to painting for 30 seconds, which is an awful lot of time.
Now, if you want to shoot landscapes at night be aware that you need to have a subject and some sort of effect. A building that is lit up at night is always a good subject with a black background to make it stand out. It becomes tricky if you have different lighting and want to create an effect AND have the sky visible with stars.
In this shot I simply used the aperture guide, set it to f5.6, cranked the ISO a little higher to 400 and the exposure to 15 seconds. This was reached after 3 shots of experimenting. BE NOT AFRAID TO TRY AND TRY AGAIN! If the shot is too dark, crank up the ISO to a certain level. If that does not work lower the Aperture, but stay at a pre-determined time. Understand this: When you expose for longer time, we established that ALL light is captured. This can cause bad effects if you have side lighting of light sources that you are not aware of. In the Boat example above the boat is lit up by a street light behind me. When I was there the pier was barely visible but because I left the shutter open for so long, the light reflecting off the pier reached my camera in sufficient amounts in order to make it stand out. These effects you can achieve without you doing anything. You just let the light do things for you. Another option is to , for example, shoot the night sky and paint a house in the foreground with a flashlight. You get an awesome night sky and a nicely lit house, why? Because you control the light. The more you paint the house, the brighter it gets.
One note about night skies. You have seen these really cool star trail shots where the stars streak across the sky. Well these are VERY long exposures, or very short ones but many of them. The maximum exposure to generate trails if you overlay the images is about 10 seoncds IF you do in-camera noise reduction. If you dont then I would say do 20 seconds at a time and make sure the night sky stay’s black. If you create a very long exposure (several minutes) within ANY light source, the sky will turn bright. This includes stray light from a city. For that reason I would stay below 30 seconds and turn noise reduction of.
More on low light coming soon…
