How to shoot great photography at night. A host of tips, including the gear you'll need, various apertures, starbursts and painting with light.
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Night photography is not easy. It means lots of time tramping around with a tripod on your shoulder when most people are eating, sleeping or generally having fun. It requires a lot of trial and error, and an exposure can take 20 minutes - or hours even.
So, why bother? Well, for me night photography has a bit of magic about it. It’s less about freezing a moment in time, more about creating an abstraction, capturing something of the mystery of the night. I’m recording this in the midst of Covid, a time when for many of us life has slowed down - and, if you are able to get out and about, you’ll find night photography is the ultimate slow photography.
Before we get going let me say I’m not a master of night photography. For that reason I’ll drop in a few images from people who are and I’ll credit those photographers. Also, some of my shots were taken on film cameras, notably my twin lens Mamiya and Shen Hao 4x5 view camera. But in this clip I’ll talk about shooting on a DSLR.
First of all, what do we mean by night photography? Here we’re NOT talking about taking photos in nightclubs using flash. Instead we generally mean landscapes, often including the built environment, often lit with artificial light, taken with long exposures.
Here’s an image that seems to contradict that - it’s a people shot, but the sources of light are the candles and since the people are holding the candles and standing in mud, they’re moving slow enough for a longish exposure.
So what about gear? Here’s what you’ll need:
A tripod - preferably a study one
A camera and lens. I generally use a mid-range zoom lens (such as my Canon 24-70) but you can go super-wide or, as here, super-super long if you like.A lens hood - it’s optional but it’s good for keeping extraneous light from squeezing in the side and muddying your image.
A shutter release. This helps you avoid jolting the camera when you press the shutter button. Shutter releases these days are cheap and they also have timers that are very handy. If yours doesn’t have a timer then you’ll need your smart phone or a stop watch to time your exposures
A torch - obviously
You’ll also need good weather - no rain, no falling snow and preferably no wind (or if it is a bit windy you’ll need a weight to keep your tripod from blowing about).
Shoot in RAW format. RAW gives you more latitude than jpeg, which means more details in the shadows and highlights.
In terms of camera mode, I shoot in manual mode as long as exposure times are 30 seconds or less. For anything longer - minutes or hours - you’ll need bulb mode. Bulb mode allows you to manually open and then close the shutter.
Let’s look at ISO, aperture and shutter speed.
With ISO the rule – as with most photography - is simple. Keep it as low as you can, ISO 100 if possible, to keep the image crisp and avoid noise.
For aperture, I usually shoot from f8 upwards for sharpness and wide depth of focus. That’s a personal preference - generally I like everything from the foreground to the background to be sharp.
Another reason to go for smaller apertures is the starburst effect. Look what happens to the street light on the right as I change the aperture from f8 to f22. It goes from a bit of a blur to these nice, clearly defined prongs of light.
Bear in mind that the smaller the aperture (in other words the larger the f-number) the longer you’ll need for exposures. So if you’re shooting at f4 for 6 seconds, to achieve the same exposure at f22, you’ll need 182 seconds, so just over three minutes.
Given the right subject matter, you CAN create some great images with a narrow depth of focus. Here’s one example. And a bonus is that exposure times will be a lot shorter.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, night photography is all about slow shutter speeds. Once I’m shooting I usually keep my ISO and aperture fairly constant and adjust shutter speed to vary exposure.
But in order get started with test shots, you might want to set a high ISO - maybe 1600 - and a wide aperture. That way you can find a good exposure without waiting around for 10 minute exposures. Say a shot works at ISO 1600, f4, 1 second shutter speed, you’ll then want to first reduce the ISO - 800, 400, 200, 100 - that’s four stops. Then you might want to close the aperture to f11. F5.6, f 8, f11 - that’s three stops. Four plus three is seven, so you’ll need to lengthen shutter speed by a total of seven stops. So 2 seconds, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. So that’s a 128 second exposure.
