Night Photography Taking photographs at night can turn even an ordinary scene into an interesting picture. To prove this point a few hours were spent in our local town, Epsom. This is an average small town in England. An essential item of equipment is a tripod, although town centres are well lit the exposures will be a few seconds long. Even though the camera is on a tripod you should use the self timer to fire the shutter to guard against any movement caused when the shutter button is pressed. Take a spare set of batteries as the long exposures will run the power down quickly. A slow ISO should be selected to minimise the risk of noise in the photographs. Using the aperture exposure setting produced results that were correctly exposed. Because of the wide contrast range there is no chance of getting detail where a light source is included and there will always be unlit parts that are completely black. It can be attractive to have some blue left in the sky. This twilight period only lasts a short length of time so you will have to be speedy with your shooting. White balance can be a problem in night shots as there are often many different types of light sources in a scene. Leaving the camera on auto white balance produced satisfactory results in most cases. The exception was when yellow street lamps were included in the shot, this was when the incandescent setting produced the best colour balance. If you are using a compact camera even the maximum aperture will yield enough depth of field. With a DSLR a smaller aperture may be required to keep the range needed in focus. In most cases you will be using the zoom at wide angle or normal setting so depth of field should not be critical. You may want to get movement in your images, for example the head and rear light trails of cars, in this case you will have to stop down and use a slower shutter speed. To get good trails of moving traffic an exposure of at least 10 seconds is required. Make sure that the car headlamps are not shining into the camera lens or you will get flare and a large area of burnt out highlights. For best results the cars should be going across the picture frame or a high viewpoint used. Six of the photographs taken are shown below. The same shots in daylight would be OK but the fact that they have been taken at night with artificial lighting that we are normally oblivious to, has made them pleasing photographs. So when you want to take some photographs but are at a loss for an idea, why not venture out into your local area with your camera after dark? |
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