Illuminating Yourself: Shooting in Low Light

During the last lesson, we devoted our time to learn how to shoot fast objects. Shooting fast objects is an essential skill for all photographers since having a fast subject is something that we couldn’t really control.

Shooting fast objects, much any other skill in photography, involves learning the principles behind it and practicing every time. We mentioned that shooting fast objects is quite tricky since it involves manipulating the shutter speed.

In order to shoot fast objects, we said that you needed to speed up your shutter speed to give you a shorter time frame for the shot thus more chances of catching an object in action. If you leave your shutter speed at around ⅕ of a second or slower, chances are your subject will be way past your frame even before your shutter closes.

The tricky part comes with the implications of a fast shutter. A fast shutter means that you will be letting in lesser light thus resulting in a dark image. Fortunately, we discussed that in order to remedy this, you can just hone your skills in using the exposure triangle.

Now to continue our discussion on shooting in different scenarios, what we will discuss today is how to shoot in low light situations.

Where There is No Light

When it comes to photography, light is everything. So what will you do when the most important thing you need is taken away from you?

The answer to that question is not just a single sentence telling you to use your built-in flash. Shooting in low-light situations should start from understanding the fact that light is never totally absent.

Unless you are in a space vacuum where light cannot penetrate anymore, you will always have light to work with. Darkness is not the absence of light but simply the lack of it. Don’t be afraid to shoot in low-light situations because your primary element, light, is gone.

Shooting in low light is all about finding the right way to extract the littlest amount of light you have around you - this process is what we are going to learn today. We will be heavily tackling our exposure triangle today so if have not read up on that, be sure to do so.

Shooting in Low Light

First things first, when shooting in low light the first thing that you would want to do is to open up your aperture. By widening your aperture, you are letting in more light inside your camera to illuminate your photo.

However, when widening your aperture, do note that your depth of field is more likely to get narrower which means that your background can get blurry.

In the event that you don’t want to open your aperture to a maximum to focus wider subjects, you can shoot one step down than your max. For example, if your lens is capable of f/2.8 then you can try shooting at f/3.6.

By stepping down and decreasing the size of your aperture, you are letting in a relatively smaller amount of light. We said that in low-light situations you will need all the light you can get and to do that you can also prolong your sensor’s exposure time to give way for more light to enter.

This is where the shutter speed comes to play. The larger the number of your shutter speed, the slower it is. If you are shooting in low light, a shutter speed of 0”3 (3 seconds) is much better than shooting at 1/10 of a second.

However, much opening your aperture, shooting at a slower shutter speed also has its downsides and that’s what we discussed the last lesson. The slower your shutter speed is, the larger the tendency for motion blur.

To address this, you can simply find the shutter speed most suitable for the situation in terms of motion blur and proceed to the next adjustment which is the ISO.

The ISO adjusts the sensitivity of your sensor to light. The higher the value of your ISO is, the more sensitive your shutter can get - a more sensitive sensor will render brighter images. The downside to using high ISO, as we mentioned before, is that it increases your grains.

Conclusion

Shooting in low light situations is a riddle that most photographers have to solve every now and then. By shooting with a wider aperture, slower shutter speed, and higher ISO, you should be able to shoot fairly well with low light.

However, always remember that the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO all work together to compensate for each other’s effects. A wider aperture equates to a narrower focus point but you can always stop down and let your shutter speed make up for the lost light. Lastly, when all else fails, your ISO is there.

So that’s basically it. Shooting in a low-light situation can be intimidating but as long as you stick to these things and use your knowledge, you should be fine.
The next lesson will wrap up this section so be sure to share this one to your friends and peers!