More night photography advices
Which camera settings for night photography
When photographing at night there are a few important camera settings to consider. Some are more important than other and can ruin the photos if not properly set.
Don’t forget to disable your flash
 | Bosphorus Bridge Istanbul Turkey at night |
When shooting landscape and cityscape at night, a flash will be of no help. The only reason to use a flash is when you want to add extra light to a portrait. Remember the flash only reaches a few meters. You might have seen camera flashes go off at big stadiums from the stand. This flash does not have any impact on your image.
ISO - keep it as low as possible
When shooting in low light conditions you might have to increase the ISO to get enough light for a proper exposure. If you increase the ISO you will introduce more noise to your images. The newest digital cameras today are capable of producing good photos with little noise even with the ISO set at 1600 or higher. However if you are serious about low light and night photography you will always use a tripod and keep the ISO at the lowest possible. On most cameras this is an ISO of 100 or 200. I only increase the ISO in situations where I don’t have my tripod available.
White balance
Taking images at night can include many different sources of light like tungsten, halogen and fluorescent. This can obviously add unwanted colour cast to you photos. The best option in most situations is to set the White balance to Day light. You can of course experiment with different setting until you find the effect you are after. If you shoot in RAW this is not a problem as you can adjust the White balance with your image editing software.
Shoot in RAW
As RAW files are more dynamic than JPEG files, they can be pushed more and allow you to darken or lighten areas dramatically when maintaining the details. Adjusting a JPEG file post processing will not allow the same possibilities of adjustment. So if your camera has the option of RAW formats, night photography is one of the situations it becomes very useful.
In-camera noise reduction
 | Chao Phraya river Bangkok Thailand at night.jpg |
Images shot at long shutter times and having a lot of dark in them are likely to have more digital noise in them. If your camera has built in nose reduction it can be a good idea to use this feature when taking photos at night. The in camera noise reduction slows down the camera. The time it takes before the camera is ready for the next image might increase up to a few seconds. Reducing digital noise can also be done with your image editing software later, but this takes even more time.
Mirror Lock-up
Mirror lock-up (MLU) is a feature available in some SLR cameras. The MLU minimize camera shake induced by the mirror when it moves inside the camera. Mirror lock-up works by separating the mirror flip and opening of the aperture in two steps. This way the vibrations caused by the mirror have time to settle down before the exposure starts. MLU can increase sharpness significantly for exposure times in the range of 1/30 to 2 seconds). For longer exposures as with most photography in low light, mirror shake is negligible. Therefore MLU is not critical for most night photography.
Continue to how to expose and focus in low light situations.
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