I think every photographer who has just got a reflex camera in their hands asks how to photograph at night, how to get beautiful photographs of the city. After spending several nights in different parts of the world, I learned how to create beautiful night photos of the sky, city, night landscape, but first things first.
Of course, to get photos of a city at night or other objects of photography, you need practice, without it anywhere. When I was completely absorbed by the world of photography, I read a lot of theory on how to properly photograph at night, but only practice and experimenting with the settings of the DSLR helped me.
The most important point for getting a beautiful night photo is the lens, I already wrote on how to choose a lens on my blog, you can also read about camera settings and how to make the right choice of a camera when buying in a store and hand-held.
By the way, if you have already wondered how to photograph a starry sky or make a time-lapse (a video from the footage), then you can read about this, I already wrote about this method of night photography in a separate article.
How to take pictures at night correctly - a few rules
To get beautiful photographs of a city at night or a night landscape, you need to understand a few rules of how to properly photograph at night:
- Set the ISO value in the settings of your camera to no more than 1600, on some older models it is possible and even less, if you do not go beyond the ISO, then there will be a minimum of noise in a night photo.
- The shutter speed when shooting a city at night should be between 1/30 sec and 1/50 sec.
- A fast lens is required, the lens aperture for night shooting should be from F1.2 to F11 maximum.
- Read my article on camera settings and make changes to picture styles in the contrast menu, keep it minimal. You will benefit from this setting because the image will not be dark.
- Look for night photography spots that are more illuminated by lanterns or other light sources.
In order to photograph at night, you need to be guided by the rules that I described and half of the success is already guaranteed to you when photographing at night, but there are other sides to the question of how to photograph correctly at night, we go further.
Practice of photographing at night, we take photographs of the night city on our own
Using the example of a photograph of a night city taken late in the evening, I will show what settings were used so that it was a little clearer for you and you knew what to focus on, because when everything is shown clearly, it is absorbed faster.
The photo was taken in the evening with the aperture set to 3.5. The ISO is set to 640 and the shutter speed is 1/30 second. If you set the same settings, then the approximate photo of the river will turn out properly, let's go further.
The longer the shutter speed when shooting at night, the more light will enter the matrix, which means the photo will be brighter, but you need to take into account the sharpness, which is important when shooting a city at night.
How to photograph at night and sharpen it correctly
If a night subject is well lit by lanterns, then boldly set the aperture to F5.6 - F8 and no more, otherwise we will lose it in the light.
And of course, all night photography is usually done at long exposures, which means that without a tripod you will not succeed. The most important thing is to position the tripod so that it stands rooted to the spot, especially in the snow.
Usually when you set the tripod on snow or loose ground, the warm legs start to fall through, let the tripod sit in place and get a solid base.
Do not forget to use a tricky setting when shooting with a tripod - the shutter delay timer. It is needed so that when you press the shutter button, the camera moves and a blurry night photo is provided to you.
During the time when the timer will keep a record, the camera will stop wobbling and the photo will not only turn out to be not blurry, but also sharp! There are also wireless shutter releases - remotes, but my method completely makes night photography acceptable without a remote control.
If a tripod is not at hand, any good base can serve as a tripod, look around, I think you will find a reliable surface from which to photograph at night.
Another method, which replaces a tripod in the situation you need, take a thick thread and attach a bolt (select the bolt to the size) with a tied thread on the bottom of the camera in the tripod socket. If the bolt is not found, then tie a knot on the camera lens. You step on the other end of the thread with your foot and pull, you get a tripod with which you can also win as a picture, but not a long exposure, up to a maximum of 1 second.
Making artistic night photography or photography secrets at night
- In order to get a trail from cars when photographing at night, we increase the shutter speed from 5 seconds, the best option to get a trail from moving light objects is 15 seconds.
- In order for the lights in a night photo to look like stars with rays, you need to close the aperture to 11, but this should be carried away with large light sources, when there are many lights.
Well, I told you how to take pictures at night, now you have many hours of practice in the fresh air and then you will take photographs of the night city from which everyone will tell you - “you have a beautiful photo”.
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