How to set up a digital camera to take good photos at night?

Night shooting with digital camera is an area that many DC fans especially like to pursue, because the convenience and intuition of digital camera greatly improve the success rate of night shooting. However, before entering the theme of night shooting, let's take a look at the following questions, which will help us better master the core skills of digital camera night shooting.

Exposure selection

Exposure is particularly important for night shooting. For digital cameras with only night scene mode and no manual exposure control, we will have other methods to adjust them.

For digital cameras with manual exposure control, we usually choose A mode (aperture first) or M mode (manual mode) to shoot at night. The instant shooting and display function of digital camera allows players to judge the effect of exposure combination in the shortest time, which is quite convenient to adjust.

When shooting at night, the author usually sets the f value to the maximum and then adjusts the shutter, so that the picture effect can be seen directly from the LCD screen. The choice of exposure time is technically limited by the parameters of the digital camera itself, and the other is different from person to person in creation. The compromise is to use a variety of exposure combinations to shoot, and then screen later.

The effect of long exposure is still attractive, especially if you want to show a brilliant night, you need long exposure to complete it. Of course, the assistance of tripod is essential. In order to obtain the towing effect caused by traffic, the shortest exposure time should not be less than 15s. Of course, experienced players can also manually control the exposure time with door B, so that the photos taken are full of fluidity.

Using simple night scene mode is far from meeting the needs of photography creation. Making full use of the existing functions of digital cameras to get more fun in shooting is our next theme. In fact, it still involves those terms we often encounter-focus, exposure, ISO, flash and so on. Let's first look at a common problem: shooting portraits at night and turning on the built-in flash to assist shooting. However, the portrait was taken clearly, but the beautiful night scene behind us was gone. How to solve it!

Note: After the built-in flash is turned on to assist shooting, the digital camera will automatically increase the shutter speed, which makes the background with weak light not well displayed in the photo due to insufficient exposure time. The pleasure of manual focusing

Let me talk about the skills under autofocus first. Because it is difficult for ordinary digital cameras to accurately focus on scenes with low contrast and low brightness, and the night scenes they shoot are often in such an environment, when shooting night scenes, we should try to focus on the bright scenes first, and then lock the focal length for composition, especially when creating portraits at night, which can improve the shooting success rate.

Manual focusing can play an effective role in shooting portraits at night and improve the success rate of shooting.

However, when shooting at night, autofocus is often insufficient, so it is very beneficial to use a digital camera with manual focus to shoot at night. The common manual focusing of digital cameras includes digital adjustment and focusing ring. Digital manual focusing can achieve accurate focusing by adjusting the distance value on the LCD screen, which can play a considerable role in shooting night scenes.

Look at the focusing effect through the LCD screen, roughly estimate the distance between the scene and the camera, and then select the appropriate focal length through the numerical display on the display screen. If you want to show a big scene or a distant scene, you can directly adjust the focal length to infinity, which can achieve the goal well.

For ordinary night shooting, clear focusing is an important guarantee for a successful photo, but for the creation of characteristics, different effects can be evolved in focusing and more fun can be obtained, so I will not discuss the choice of exposure in depth in this article for the time being.

Directional thinking on breaking the white balance

White balance is a major feature of digital cameras, especially when shooting at night, choosing different white balance will directly affect the color tone and artistic conception of photos, because the light generated by floodlights of buildings and scenery at night can present more colored light on digital cameras than the naked eye.

Therefore, when shooting at night, we should break the automatic white balance that we have always relied on, which will affect the inherent color of light and make it lose its unique color temperature feeling. In order to highlight colorful lanterns, you can set the white balance to "daylight" or "outdoor" mode. Of course, trying to shoot with different white balances will have unexpected effects.

A sensitive issue

The sensitivity (ISO) of digital camera also plays an important role in night scene shooting, which is always accompanied by positive and negative results. Increasing the ISO value can improve the shutter speed, which is beneficial to the stability of shooting and reduces the difficulty of shooting. At the same time, the noise increase caused by the improvement of ISO is often obvious. For digital cameras without manual exposure control, increasing ISO value can obtain stable imaging effect in night scene shooting, which is also an available method.

High-end digital cameras usually have a wider range of ISO options, and can even shoot with ISO800 and ISO 1600 settings. In order to reduce noise, in addition to turning on the "noise reduction" function of digital camera, you can also shoot with lower photo resolution under high ISO setting, and also reduce noise interference to some extent.

Now there is a solution, and the suggestions are as follows: use a tripod to assist shooting, and set the shutter to 1s or 2s through manual exposure control, which will display the background of the person at night well under a long enough exposure time, but keep the posture of the person unchanged when shooting. In addition, you can also use the Slowsync flash mode of the digital camera, that is, after the built-in flash is finished, continue to expose for a little time, so that the background scenery can also be photographed, so that the characters and background are fully exposed at night, and of course it is best to shoot with a tripod.

The above skills are the most basic content of digital camera night shooting. After mastering these skills, players can also creatively take more and better photos.