Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Night Art Photography

In This Chapter

• Eliminating blur in your nighttime photos

• Taking a clear photo at night without a flash or tripod

• Understanding film speed for nighttime shooting

• Shooting nighttime flash photos

• Identifying the modes and settings for nighttime photography

• Reading night light for spectacular shots

Picture the light of a lantern under an arch, stone tombstones lit by the moon, or the streaming red lights of a police car slicing the night sky. Images of the night have mystified and intrigued artists throughout time, especially with the advent of photography. After all, you have to have light to create a photograph, and nighttime is well, dark. However, with the tricks and techniques I show you in this chapter, you can tame the night and capture the denizens of the dark — at least in a photo. Not only can you capture what the night truly holds, but you can also use low-light situations to your creative advantage to craft shots that are fantasy-like, just like the magic of the night itself.

Taking a Shot in the Dark

Understandably, shooting at night has inherent problems — namely, the lack of available light. Without adequate light, color tones shift, becoming overly muted and neutral, as shown in Figure 10-1. To compensate for the low light, you can tweak the following settings by themselves or in combination, but each can introduce more problems:

• Use a wider aperture ...