Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers

140 Using Light

Night Photography

Night Photography

Digital photography opens new realms for image cre-

ation at night, along with new problems and pitfalls.

Digital sensors don’t see the night the way our human

eyes do (or the way film did, for that matter).

Your digital sensor doesn’t really care that there isn’t

very much light out there in the night. You may be

stumbling around in the dark trying not to fall off of

a cliff (the chief occupational risk to night photogra

-

p

hers), but provided you expose your camera so that

the sensor gets plenty of light, your photos won’t por-

t

ray the scene as dark at all.

The fly in this ointment is that exposing a night scene

properly means using a high ISO, or a very long shut-

t

er speed (sometimes in minutes), or both, resulting

in substantial levels of noise (see Chapter 4 for more

about noise, and pages 162–163 for information about

noise reduction in the digital darkroom).

Your digital sensor will be able to pick up and record

light you can barely see, particularly after sunset. For

example, even after the glow of sunset has faded from a

cliff to human eyes, it is often still colorful and vibrant

to a digital camera, provided the photo is properly ex

-

posed and post-processed.

Sometimes the beautiful after effects of sunset are in-

v

isible to the naked eye, but picked up by the camera,

and don’t emerge until the photo is post-processed in

the digital darkroom.

Most likely, the light meter in your camera will be use-

les

s in low-light night conditions. There are a couple

of other constraints that make night exposures harder

to get right:

n

The image in your LCD may be completely dark

(even when the RAW capture contains plenty of

good information), making it difficult to review im-

a

ges in the field. You’ll need to learn to decode

im

ages in your LCD that bear a only a slight rela-

t

ionship to the actual finished image.

n

Individual captures can take a long time, particu-

larly when long exposure noise reduction is turned

on (as it should be, see page 95); you may not have

the opportunity to make more than one or two ex

-

p

osures per night, with each exposure draining an

entire battery.

Obviously, if you are going to be doing much night

work, you need to get good at guesstimating exposures

with relatively little information in night conditions.

Two techniques I’ve found that help come up with rea-

s

onable exposures are to:

n

Start photographing before it is entirely dark, and

keep photographing as it becomes apparently black.

This helps me understand the exposure realities as

full night does take over, and gives me a starting

place for deriving my full night exposures.

n

Use a boosted ISO and a faster shutter speed to es-

tablish a correct exposure, then use the comparative

version of the exposure equation to capture a ver-

sio

n at lower ISO and a longer exposure time (see

pages 28–29 for a night-time case study using this

technique).

Not all night photography is of grand vistas. This photos shows Christmas lights

reflected in a water drop.

200mm f/4 macro lens, 30 seconds at f/25 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

T

his five-minute exposure of Mount Tamalpais at night shows stars, ambient light,

and vehicles in motion.

18–200mm VR zoom lens at 18mm, 300 seconds at f/3.5 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

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