Remember your teenage days when you ran wild through the streets, spastic and enjoying life? If only we had DSLR’s back then, we’d have some hysterical pictures.
I may not be a teen anymore, but I have an SLR and a bit of energy to go with it. Both of these went to good use last Saturday when a couple of friends, Dedra Long, Lain Ehmann (editor of Simple Scrapbooks and host of the podcast, ScrapHappy), and I spent the evening in downtown Mesa.
Fortunately I knew a few things about night photography. I’m definitely not an expert (so any advice from one will trump my own) but I do okay. Here are a few tips for your next outdoor night adventure with your camera.
Light Source
Unless you have a separate professional flash (not the one attached your camera), night photos of people are inherently imperfect. It’s a matter of deciding which type of imperfection you are most willing to accept, and that will all depend on how you’ll get your light.
There are three ways to give your camera enough light without using the flash.
1) Open the aperture all the way by lowering the f-stop to its lowest setting. The drawback is that this effects your depth of field and if you’re shooting more than on person, you’ll have one person in focus and the rest will be hazy faded background.
Because our photos were featuring three faces,plus at least one statue face, a low f-stop wasn’t an option for me. I set my f-stop for the lowest I felt I could reasonably do. The photos above were set at a 5, which is quite low for the number of subjects. Note how the second on is especially blurry.
The photo below was at an 8.
2) Another way to get more light is to lower the ISO. But the lower the ISO, the grainier the photo. Some will choose to lower the ISO all the way to 1600, allowing for the grain in order to decrease focus problems and action blurs. Below is a photo my husband took a while back. This gritty grain lends its own style and I actually like it for this “night out with friends” photo.
I decided to set the ISO for 800 while with Dedra and Lain, which allowed me to capture the colors and details of our downtown area.
3) The last way to get light is by lowering the shutter speed and this is where I chose to compromise. I used an extremely low shutter speed, which means that the shutter is open for a longer amount of time while the camera is taking pictures. It will capture any movement that happens while the shutter is open, sometimes resulting in smeared heads and trailing arms:
Whichever light option you choose, you’re compromising somewhere. If you choose to compromise on the shutter speed, ask your subjects to hold as still as possible. But remember, humans aren’t statues. We just can’t hold that still.
Night Photography Requires A Tripod
Speaking of holding still, you’ll need to set the camera on something sturdier than your hand when photographing at night. If you didn’t bring along a tripod, you’ll have to get creative:
Much of our social time happens at night and with spring here, more of that is happening outdoors. We’re so lucky these days to have options available to us, amateur photographers and scrapbookers. The more we understand our cameras, the more of life we can capture.
Lain and Dedra drooling outside one of Mesa’s best scrapbooking stores, Mystic Paper.
