Master the art of low light photography

Shooting in low light is a photography skill that you must to master because on many occasion the photographer can found itself in a low light environment, while he/she need to take photos, but to do that you must first learn how to manually adjust your setting as we show in the previous article.

Let’s say the sun started to set and you start to run out of light, Or you’re shooting in your house and you only have as many lights as they're available.

Here, There are 3 solutions  you can try, Which are :
1. Open your Aperture
2. Slow down your Shutter
3. Increase the ISO

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So the first thing to try is to open up the f-stop; Now if you are not comfortable with it being too shallow of a depth of field, try setting it at 2.8 first.

From there you go to your shutter speed, and slowing down is really the most importing thing to do, but if you go below 1/60th you should know that you’re going to start to get some blur in your image, so the solution is to start at 1/60th.

Then, you move to the ISO, so it is important to know how sensitive can your camera go before you start to get too much grain. And this is really all about testing because you won’t know until you put it on your computer and you see what it actually looks like.

Note: Opening iris Mean = Lower number = Large opening = More light.

Now as not to say that you shouldn’t go to higher ISO or you shouldn’t go to 1/8th shutter speed or something slower than 1/60th, it’s just that you need to practice, you need to see what it look like and decide as a photographer do you like that look? Do you like it when it has that grain, do you like it with that shallow depth of field, or do you like a little bit blur.

Maybe your father’s really animated and moving his arms, and you take a photo and he’s still crisp but his arms are blurry and that might be something you are looking to do, and as you become more experience you will be able to know as «  Oh I remember taking that one photo when I was in that low lighting situation and now in a similar situation and I want to replicate that same look » and you will know the setting to go for achieving that look.

Remember when it comes to low light Photography, the three things you need to do are bring up your ISO, make your sensor more sensitive, bring your shutter speed to a slower rate so it’s closer to 1/60th or even less than that. And Open up your aperture by going to a lower number, the lowest possible most likely, so that you have as much light coming in as possible.

Go out there and practice in the low lighting and it’s all about your creativity ultimately.

In the Next Lessons, we will learn how to shot in the deep dark nights as a pro Photographer.