Night Photography

Night Photography

The difficult part of photographing at night is getting the exposure right. First, if there are any lights in your frame, do not aim right at them when setting the exposure or your camera will think the whole image is bright. Try a test shot and see what happens. If you image is too dark or too bright, use your camera’s exposure compensation. If you want it brighter, move the compensation to the right. If you want it darker, move it to the left.

Wichita Falls Texas Photography

Given the long exposures necessary to photograph at night, you can use the opportunity to capture streaks of light. Include a street in your composition and click the shutter just before some cars enter the frame to get streaks of car lights. This works best if you can manage to get just the tail lights of cars and no head lights if you are relatively close to the cars.

If you really want to stay up late and have some fun, try star trails! You need to get away from any city lights to do this. Try to find a location away from the city where you can see many stars at night. And remember to pass on the campfire to keep the air clear of smoke. This works best if you can find an object with good shape to put in the foreground so you have more than just the stars in the frame. Something like a cactus or maybe a log cabin or a tent. In this photograph, I found a lake with well defined mountains behind it. I used a flashlight for a few minutes to light the foreground rocks in this 50 minute exposure. It takes some practice, but it is always fun to see what the human eye cannot see.

One difficulty in photographing at twilight and night is achieving a sharp image. This is due to two factors: camera stabilization and focus.

Camera Stabilization

To photograph during twilight or at night, you need to use a tripod. If you do not have a tripod, you can try using a bean bag or your backpack or a ledge to stabilize your camera, but using any of these will limit your choice of composition. Get a tripod. Even for daytime photography, you will notice an immediate difference in the quality of your images when you use a tripod.

At twilight and at night, you should also use a cable release or the 2 second timer to avoid touching your camera. Try this out to see what I mean: put a telephoto lens on your camera and attach it to your tripod. Use liveview so you can see the image in the LCD screen. Increase the magnification. Now touch your camera. You will see the image in the LCD jiggle just a little and it takes a moment to stop vibrating. This is what happens when you press the shutter. Using your self-timer or a cable release will allow you to trip the shutter without causing vibration to your camera. This vibration is not noticeable when you use a fast shutter speed, but on long-exposures, it can ruin your final image.

Another trick to increase the sharpness of a twilight or night image is to use the mirror lockup feature on your camera. The mirror is what allows you to see the image through the viewfinder. When you click the shutter, the mirror pops up so it is out of the way, the shutter opens and closes, and the mirror goes down again. When the mirror pops up before the shutter opens, even that little amount of movement can cause vibration.

I have had the best results using the mirror lock up feature combined with the 2 second timer. This way when I click the shutter button the mirror goes up right away, 2 seconds pass allowing all vibration to stop, and then the shutter opens and closes.

Focus

This brings us to the problem of focus. Your camera’s auto-focus feature may not work very well in low light conditions. Many cameras will fire an “auto-focus assist” beam of infrared light when you hold the shutter half way down, but you may find that it does not work well when the subject is a fair distance away. You have a number of choices to help in this scenario. First, if it is possible, you can turn on some lights or use a flashlight and set the focus first. Second, you can set up your camera before the sun goes down, set the focus, and then turn off the auto-focus to prevent your camera from trying to refocus when you are ready to take the shot. Your third option is to focus manually. I often use my liveview in the LCD monitor, increase its magnification, and then focus manually.