Photographing night life

Last post on photography was about exposure triangle. Will talk about one of specific kind of photography today, Photographing night life. Night photography requires lots of patience and calmness. During night time we usually don’t get lots of lights (unless you are under halogen lights.).  It doesn’t matter if you are using any kind of kits. If you have a very expensive camera, but don’t know how to control light there is no point of having a high-end gadget. Here are some important stuff you might need to shoot at night.
1. Camera
2.Tripod
3. External Flash
4. Speed lights ( Depends on your shooting)

As we learned in the previous post we can control light using ISO ,aperture and shutter speed. So keep ISO at optimum level. Remember higher ISO will cause higher noise/grains in the image. So about 400 should be fine. If you need more light then try to reduce the aperture ( low f number). If you still need some light shutter speed can be reduced (1/4 sec or even lower). If you want to shoot portraits in the night, then use external flash. They are better than on-camera flash. Remeber again , once you reduce the shutter speed you will need a tripod. Tripod is must for sharper shoots. You can use remote to trigger the shutter, that will be an additional benefit. It will reduce camera shake and produce sharper image.

The above picture was taken without a tripod. Hence you can see the blurry image. If it was on a tripod then it would have been a different story. This was shot at about 11 pm in the night, the shutter speed was 3 seconds, aperture f 14 and ISO 200 . If you see this image in full resolution, you can notice there is not much noise in it. That’s because the ISO was low. If you want to capture a light trail you would need almost the same settings as above. The below image was shot on a tripod, so you can see more sharper image.

See the light trails on the road. That’s because of the slow shutter speed.

Now keep experimenting night shoots :).

Bye for now. See you soon with a new post. Keep reading and keep sharing. …