![]() ![]() ![]() Samuel Nute, a landscape photographer, has tips on night sky photography - sometimes called astrophotography- which requires very long exposures and especially careful attention to focus. If your subject moves an inch or two away from the camera, they all of a sudden go out of the range of focus.” Setting your shot up carefully and asking your human subjects to be still can help ensure that your image is clear. When they open up to a really wide depth of field, there’s not a lot of forgiveness on sharpness. He warns that “a lot of people miss focus at night their subjects aren’t sharp. Shooting at night is a little bit slower of a game.” To avoid blur, Tan notes “You might have to be a little bit more steady if you’re opening up on your aperture or slowing your shutter speed. With longer exposure and a wider aperture, sharp focus on your subject can be tricky. You have to add things in, because you have less to work with.” It’s a different frame of mind because you really have to think about the composition. Sometimes it can be as simple as waiting for a car to go by and shine its headlights for a second that just gives you that little edge. Pidgeon thinks photographers should “find a way to pop in a little something on the corner of that building, so that you’re defining the edge. So if you’ve got light on one part of the building, and it just bleeds off so you can’t tell where the building ends and the night sky begins, that doesn’t look so great.” He notes that “a lot of times you want to use light to define the shape of things or the scale of things. Pidgeon recommends a few different ways to explore light in nighttime street photography. That consistency gives you time to play - even though you’ll need slow shutter speeds and a wide aperture - you’ll have an evenly lit backdrop where you can experiment. “You can keep trying things until you feel like you got it right without worrying about the light changing.” During the day, when you’re outside, the sun is constantly changing.” And so you have a lot of room to experiment you can keep trying things until you feel like you got it right without worrying about the light changing. ‘This cool neon sign - if I overexpose it, it will go out to white instead of this cool red or green.’ You work with that until you get your baseline.”Īlex Tan, a photographer and art director, says that night photography is the best environment to work in because, unlike with daytime shoots, the light’s “not changing - it’s very much the same throughout the night. “Then find out how far you can go without blowing out the highlights. “You need to get a baseline exposure that shows you what you’re getting with the ambient light,” Pigeon says. That means your shutter speed has to be slower just to get the shot. You’ll never get the control afforded by daytime photography settings, so when you’re aiming to take great night shots, be sure to give yourself time to experiment.Īnthony Pidgeon, a veteran of low-light and nighttime shoots, suggests starting with a few test shots to establish the optimal shutter speed and find the right white balance: “Because it’s dark, the image will take longer to register on the sensor or the film. That could mean adding a flash or a fill light or just asking your subject to step forward into the glow of a streetlamp.Įach of these has its own set of constraints, requiring either good planning or a little luck (if you want that tree branch to move out of your light, you’ll need a length of rope or a very steady wind). But you can also look for ways to adjust the light on your subject. Nighttime photography settings are a good place to begin: opening up your aperture, slowing down your shutter speed, or (controversially) fiddling with your ISO (the sensitivity of your digital camera - comparable to film speed in a film camera). ![]()
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