Night Photography - Some Basics

In response to a post from the other day that had night shots of Waldameer, Eden of So Anyways asked if I could post some how-to's or tips for doing nighttime photography.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert at this. But I can at least share some of the basic concepts and give a few examples. To take nighttime shots, you should have an SLR camera with an adjustable lens, either film or digital -- a point-and-shoot camera probably isn't going to cut it.

Turn Off the Flash

The first thing to do is to turn off your flash -- you won't need it unless you're doing something like a portrait against a night background (one thing I haven't tried).

Reducing Motion Blur

The most important difference between night and daylight photography is that it takes a lot longer to capture enough light to make an exposure. For that reason, you will want to use a tripod to keep your camera still -- otherwise, you'll probably end up with a very blurry image. (Although in some cases, you may want that.) In a pinch, you may be able to rest the camera body against a railing or some other solid surface to stabilize the shot.

Night Landscape Mode

If you have a newer digital SLR, you probably have a setting called 'night landscape'. Kodak just announced some new additions to its EasyShare line that have this feature, but aren't priced to bankrupt ($150-250). This is a really good starting point, especially if you want to do a sunset shot where the foreground isn't just a silhouette, or a panoramic image of a city skyline or the like. To be fair, pictures taken this way can look a bit overexposed, though, like this one:


To do more advanced night photography, you need the same basic things you would need to make an exposure for any other kind of photography. Having an SLR camera with a manual setting gives you control over the following elements:

1. Sensitivity in capturing light, via either film or a digital sensor, measured as ISO rating (somewhere between 100-4000)


2. The size of the opening that the light comes through. This is referred to as aperture, or depth-of-field (typically between f/3.5 and f/22)


3. The amount of light that enters the camera through the shutter, aka shutter speed. This is measured in seconds and can be as long as 30 minutes or more, or as short as 1/1000 of a second (the upper and lower limits will depend on your camera)

Understanding a little about all three will help you get better shots, night or day.

Manual Focus

In many cases, the auto-focus feature on your camera isn't going to know how to focus a night shot. You may have to switch to manual focus mode.


Optimizing ISO

Using film with a higher ISO rating, or setting the digital sensor to a higher ISO value, means that you can use a faster shutter speed and/or greater depth-of-field. The trade-off to this is that really sensitive film is expensive, and higher digital ISO settings can produce grainy images or unwanted noise (random white pixels). Here's an example of a high ISO (3200) shot:


Here's an example of a relatively lower ISO shot (1000) taken with about the same amount of ambient light:


Lower ISO values translate to more color saturation, so I tend to keep the ISO as low as possible and rely on the tripod and a shallow aperture (f/3.5 - f/5) to help compensate.

Optimizing Aperture

Aperture, or depth of field, determines how far into the background distant objects will remain in focus. A shot taken using a shallow aperture setting (f/3.5) requires much less light to expose than a deeper aperture setting (f/22), so keep it shallow if you can, unless you want more depth of field, like in this mid-range shot taken at an aperture of f/10:


Optimizing Shutter Speed

The faster your shutter speed, the less motion blur you get, so plan accordingly. In some cases, you want that blur for artistic effect. In others, it might keep you from capturing what you want.

Putting It All Together

Adjusting your ISO rating and depth-of-field can allow you to lengthen or shorten your shutter speed -- increasing or decreasing motion blur as desired. Increasing the aperture (making it shallow) can produce an attractive light blur in a cityscape. A higher ISO might be able to capture silhouettes of geese flying against a sunset, where a lower wouldn't.

If there's a formula to making this all work consistently, I don't know it -- I wish I did. I find that my camera's light meter is pretty reliable for taking shots of spotlit buildings, like the one below:


However, I find that I have to wing it if I'm doing landscapes or scenes with a lot of bright light sources. The light meter didn't help me at all with this one -- I took shot after shot until it looked somewhat right in the LCD (which tends to show exposures brighter than they really are):


I shoot digital these days so I tend to take 4-5 shots of the same thing at exposure levels at, above and below what the light meter suggests, and pick the best one later. (That's a really expensive habit if you're shooting film -- not sure what to tell you there.)

In a long exposure, an object in motion will seem to disappear unless it's really bright. In this shot taken near dusk, my daughter's arm was moving so it blurred out almost completely (not a great shot but it demonstrates the concept):


Likewise, this shot captures a boat coming into the marina at French Creek -- the only objects bright enough to be picked up in the exposure were the ship's running lights:

If you've ever seen a shot with a night highway full of red and white trailers -- same basic concept.

And at a slow enough exposure, waves start to look like fog:


That's about all I can tell you right now. Like I said, I'm still figuring out how to do this stuff. Flickr has groups for just about anything and everything, and some incredibly talented photographers -- both locally and globally. Check it out, and if you see stuff you'd like to know how to do, ask. Most people are more than happy to talk about their work and help you improve your own technique.

Happy shooting!

My Phat New Ride

Finally got rid of the SUV and bought something smaller. P and I had purchased an 02 Ford Explorer in late 2004 -- made sense at the time because we had 4 kids (our 3 girls and our nephew) and needed the third row, but also wanted something with 4WD. It had nothing to do with status, or keeping up with the Jones' or any of that silly shit -- it was just the most practical choice under the circumstances. Whoever had the kids with them took the SUV, and whoever didn't drove the sedan.

So that worked out fine for a while. Eventually, though, my nephew went back to living with his mom and we didn't really need the third row seating very often. And when P and I split up, I took the Explorer because the loan was in my name. More often than not, I was driving alone, and with all the time I spent out driving around to take photos, the cost of gas started to really, really hurt.

I checked around at 4-5 dealerships and searched around AutoTrader for a while, and as of this afternoon, (for about the same as what I'd have paid for an 04 Dodge Neon) I have an 01 Olds Aurora. I'm liking it a lot, so far -- it has those little luxury touches, like the unusually polite 'headlights suggested' message that popped up on the message display when I was driving at dusk. There are a few quirks I have to figure out yet, like the fact that the seat seems to return to some preset position (suitable for someone much taller than me) whenever I shut off the car. Overall, it seems to drive a lot like a Lexus that my brother used to have.

From Wikipedia:

JPG Magazine Submission - Creative License Theme

I could use a little love in the form of a 'thumbs up' vote, if you're so inclined:

Some Quick Night Shots at Waldameer

I was out at Presque Isle this evening, and stopped by Waldameer about 20 minutes before they closed. I've been wanting to take some night shots there for a while now, and took a quick stroll around to get some of the rides that were still running. Of the set, the only one that I'm really happy with is the pic of the bumper cars. Next time I'll go back when I have more time to spare, plan my shots a little bit better and try to make them more interesting. I do like the color on all of these, though.

JPG Magazine

An old friend poked me with a stick and got me to start putting some stuff on JPG Magazine, so I put on some of my favorites from Flickr.

Weirdest Search Hit Yet

This search hit just in from the Islamic Republic of Iran... 'mummified damsels'. And somehow I'm the number three site in the search results, between two pages dedicated to bondage movies. Yippee!

Dating Advice from My Wife and Other Weirdness

God my life is weird, anymore. Not just "Hey, my grilled cheese sandwich looks kinda like Jesus!" odd -- I'm talking full-blown P. T. Barnum sideshow. I've got the kind of stuff going on that nobody would believe as a short story, you know?

The thing that's outwardly the strangest is, to me, the most mundane of the lot. I take a somewhat skeptical, but not close-minded, view of the paranormal. On the one hand, nobody's come forward with anything like conclusive evidence of a haunting and there have been some famously-exposed frauds, but on the other hand, there's a mess of anecdotal evidence that spans a number of cultures. Ya know? So I've kept the door open a crack, but haven't gone outside looking.

Anyway, at some point over the winter, I came to the conclusion that I'd been seeing a ghost, or apparition, or whatever you want to call it, sitting on my staircase looking down. On at least 4-5 separate occasions now, I've been at the computer in the living room and thought that I saw my 4-yr-old daughter sitting there watching me. She does that sometimes -- just sits on the middle step without saying a word. So I didn't think much of seeing a pale, blonde girl in a white nightgown sitting there. But then I would say something, turn to look at her and find that there was nobody there. This has happened mostly around the twilight hours of morning or evening, and usually when I felt at peace and well-rested. If someone told me this, it would probably make me feel uneasy. But oddly enough, living it out doesn't have that effect. It feels perfectly fine.

Somewhat weirder was a long phone conversation I had last night with an old friend from college. By "friend", I mean a very beautiful someone who clearly had no romantic interest whatsoever in me at the time, but with whom I'd been so infatuated that I'd have walked in front of a bus if she'd suggested that doing so might be a cool thing to do. (That was a tough 6 months, let me tell you.) And what was really weird last night was coming to the realization that, even though it sounded like she hadn't changed at all, I didn't feel any of that attraction anymore. It was like talking to my sister. WTF?

But by far the weirdest has been the fact that my wife and I have been giving each other dating and relationship advice. We hang out together sometimes on breaks and lunches at work, talking and laughing (which really messes with the busybodies), but our conversations have mostly been about separating our assets (ok, debts is more like it) finalizing our separation and/or talking about who we think we might like to boink. It's probably really harming my chances of meeting anyone new at work, but I kinda don't want to meet anyone at work, so that's not necessarily a bad thing for me.

So that's my life these days. If things continue at this pace, I'll probably have a two-headed pet and the stigmata by end-of-year.