Night Photography the secret sauce finally revealed

One of my favorite types of photography is night photography, it is slightly different than low light photography that we already cover in the previous lesson, so there is quite a bit of skill but also a lot of experimentation that comes with this.

Let’s say it’s a pitch-black night and you can’t even see what you’re trying to take a photo of , but you know that there is something there. There’s a couple of things you will need, which I will list below and we will talk about each one of them.

First thing is a DSLR tripod or some sort of stabilization where you can click that photo button and not move the camera at all because the second you move the camera is when you get blurring, and you don’t get a clean image.

Again do what you want to do, but for me to get that clean image I prefer a tripod.

A second thing you need to do is having a long exposure, meaning your shutter need to be close to 1 second (Yes seriously like one second or more) or 10 seconds exposure, even 30-second exposure. This is something I find my self-doing constantly.

The next thing, you have to know what you’re taking the image of, if there are lights in your photo then you’re actually maybe going to need to close down your iris, maybe go for f2 so that as you do that long exposure there will be not too much light coming through your lens, and ultimately you have to test, even in the moment of taking the photo you want to take, you should just try a « 30-second exposure, f5.6 with ISO 400 » and if it’s really bright, which sometimes it will be which is sort of surprising because I will be pitch black outside, you then know «  Oh, I should go to ISO 100 » and maybe 30sec exposures too long, maybe try 20sec exposure, but what you’re able to do with this is :

• See the starts
• All car lights (any moving light, airplane lights will become streaks of light covering your entire image) 
• Any people or water moving will come very blurred, and it can look very nice and it’s something to experiment with.

Another key element to this though is if you can’t see what you’re taking a photo through your viewfinder, you will need to take that photo to know what your frame is. A few things that I typically watch out for are where cars are because a lot of times cars actually have a really cool streaks, but if you do it for only a second you’ll have a small streak while if you do it for 5 seconds, you’ll have a long streak, and if you do it for 30 seconds maybe you’ll have a few cars passing and you’ll get different colors of streaks which are really cool in my mind.

The other cool thing you can do is look at the stars and really expose for the starts, try to bring them out a little bit more, but also be wary that if you have a city lights in your image those will affect you because they’re a lot brighter than the stars are.

Why you need a prime lens to do low light photography :

I always recommend a prime lens for low light photography, because those lenses can go to closer to f1.4 even f2, so that is twice or quadruple the amount of light.

Easy to follow Method to do night photography:

So to recap what we were talking about, and for you have an easy to follow method, I create for you this step by step night photography method:
A. Open up the f-stop (most open up, to allow the most lights possible) and see what amount of light you have.
B. Shutter speed: Start as high as possible like 1/100 or even 1/600, if you want motion blurred go under that; If you have a tripod you can go under that also, but anything moving will get a little blur at around 130th 150th
C. ISO: First you need to know what your cameras are capable of handling, then take it out and shooting some tests to see what are the sweets numbers.

Finally, all I can say for this is go experiment, go and see what’s possible and be sure to bring some friends, maybe some hot chocolate, a warm jacket because a lot of times it gets cold at night. And you will find your self-doing this for few hours, I know that I do, and enjoy.
Composition and rule of thirds will be the talk of our next lesson.