Night Photography: film & digital
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
What is Night Photography and how can you take a picture at night DIGITALLY?
What does night photography add to an artist’s expression options?
GHOSTING
Use the B function on the camera. Think about your length of exposure time and DEPTH of field when considering an f-stop. USE A TRIPOD!
Remember to COUNT and THINK.
long exposure, move SLOW—then hold.
***you NEED a tripod***
"MULTIPLE EXPOSURES"
Use the B function on the camera. Think about your length of exposure time and DEPTH of field when considering an f-stop. USE A TRIPOD!
Remember to COUNT and THINK.
flashlights, penlights, headlights, etc.
***you NEED a tripod***
MOVING LIGHTS/WRITING WITH LIGHT
Use the B function on the camera. Think about your length of exposure time and DEPTH of field when considering an f-stop. USE A TRIPOD!
Remember to COUNT and THINK.
using a flashlight. Turn it on and off in several locations.
***you NEED a tripod***
NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOS
EXAMPLES OF OLD PHOTOS
Use High ISO Testing as an Exposure Guide
If you’re still unsure about how to determine exposures from scratch, use a trick called High ISO Testing as your guide. Here’s how it works. For each successive increase of your ISO dial and full stop in opening the aperture notch of your lens, your subsequent exposure time will be cut in half. Let’s say you boosted your ISO to 6400—a 6x difference from ISO 100—and fully opened your aperture to f/2.0—increasing the amount of light from a mid-range setting of f/8.0. While these settings will potentially yield an image with unappealing contrast, increased grain and limited depth of field, you can save valuable time by shooting an exposure bracket to identify a well exposed histogram at these settings. Let’s say the ideal histogram for this scene corresponds with a shutter speed of 4 seconds. You can then do the math to calculate the required exposure time for the same scene captured at ISO 100 and f/8, which would be a total of 32 minutes.