How to take dark night photos using lightroom

Take good photos at night: 10 tips for night street photography

1. Ideal camera settings for night street photography

When shooting during the day, I would set the shutter at 1/320, minimum 1/160. But this is not the case in the night setting. You can shoot at a shutter speed of 1/250 in a bright place at night, but in most cases the shutter speed can only reach 1/160 or even 1/60 per second. You need to hold your camera very steadily, use a wide-angle lens if possible, and try shooting at a shutter speed of 1/60. Practice will increase your stability.

1/125th at f/2.5, ISO 6400

The reason why it is recommended to use a wide-angle lens is that the longer your focal length, the faster the shutter speed you need to make the picture clear. Using 28mm, 35mm or 50mm will make it easier to shoot at slower shutter speeds. And the advantage of wide-angle lenses is that they usually have a relatively large aperture. In some relatively bright places at night, you can even shoot with a shutter speed of F/4 aperture priority. A wide aperture like F/2.8 or even F/1.8 will greatly increase your shooting success rate.

Finally, raise the ISO. Most cameras now have a strong ability to handle ISO noise. So don't worry about noise. However, there is still a limit, usually ISO3200, up to 6400 is about the same.

2. Find the light source first

Remember to find the light source in the scene you want to shoot first, even during the day. It becomes even more important to find a light source at night, because no matter how great the picture is at night, it will be useless without a proper light source. Therefore, it is recommended to first find a light source near the scene you want to shoot, pick the light you like, and then wait for the scene to happen.

3. Shooting nightlife

When shooting at night, try to observe scenes that will not happen during the day, such as nightlife. Here are some nighttime shots worth checking out.

4. Properly control the shooting distance

The advantage of this shooting technique is that when you are at a distance from the subject, you do not need a too fast shutter speed. It is relatively easy to take clearer pictures. From a distance, you may be able to freeze a moving figure with a shutter speed of 1/60, but if you are close, you may need to speed up the shutter speed to at least 1/125.

5. Tripod and blur effect

The most ideal way to shoot street photography is with a handheld camera. The reason is that you don’t know what will happen when and where. A handheld camera can You react the fastest. However, there is an exception when you want to lock an area to capture the comings and goings of people and their movement.

6. Flash

Using flash is the most obvious method when shooting at night. But using a flash can easily draw people’s attention. I personally don’t like to use flash to take pictures of people. Not to mention that others feel uncomfortable, I feel uncomfortable myself. I prefer to use some ambient light sources at night. But many street photographers do use flash to shoot at night, and if used properly, they can actually produce good results.

Using flash gives you more room to play at night. You can use faster shutter speeds and a shallower depth of field, and you don't have to worry about the noise problems caused by too high an ISO. There are two ways to use flash at night. One is to focus on a certain person or object. When shooting, only that subject will be clearly highlighted, and the other backgrounds will be dark. Or move farther away to include the entire scene and just make your subject stand out a little. It depends on what message you want to convey with your image.

7. Regarding excessive noise and underexposure

When raising the ISO, try to adjust the exposure to the correct value as much as possible.

Many times, even if you think you have adjusted the exposure value correctly, your exposure is still inaccurate because the environment is too dark. It's almost impossible to get the correct exposure for every photo. Most of the time, the advice is to shoot a low-exposed scene and then use post-production to increase the exposure.

For those photos that may have noise or incorrect exposure, I will first adjust the exposure and composition in post-production software such as Lightroom. Of course, many times when the exposure value is adjusted to the correct level, there will be too much noise. But there is a way to solve this problem, that is, do not use JPG when shooting, but use RAW files.

8. About blur and imperfection

Take photos as clear as possible, but please remember that blurry photos are not necessarily bad. Even if the photos are blurry sometimes, they still have it. value. When shooting at night, don’t worry about getting every photo clear. The content in the picture and whether the entire atmosphere is in place are the key points you need to consider.

9. Photos taken at night should be dark

This statement may sound a bit obvious, but what I want to say is that I think photos taken at night should be dark. It looks like it was taken at night, doesn't it? There will be a lot of darkness, underexposure, and some unclear details in the picture.

If you look at the histogram (chromatogram curve) of the photos taken at night, you will find that compared with the photos taken during the day, the light and dark deviation in the histogram of the photos taken at night will be significantly to the left (dark part).

When you shoot at night with automatic exposure, the camera often misinterprets that the scene is dark and causes overexposure. At this point you will want to decrease the exposure by one (most cameras use -1 to reduce the exposure by one step). There’s nothing right or wrong about shooting at night to look like daytime, but my main point is not to worry about your photos taken at night looking too dark, because that’s exactly what night looks like.

10. Pay attention to safety

It depends on the area where you live, but it is not always safe to go out with a camera at night. Try to stay as light as possible and always be alert and safe. Study your subject before shooting. Don't shoot everything. You can even go with a friend or two or a photographer. You don’t want to get yourself in trouble for street photography at night.