How can I light up the night scene behind the characters?

Then let's take a look at what equipment is needed to shoot the city lights at night.

The first is, of course, the digital camera itself. Even ordinary consumer digital cameras are generally divided into fully automatic and quasi-professional manual models. If you want to shoot a perfect night scene of city lights, then a digital camera with aperture priority, shutter priority and full manual adjustment function is essential. Only by making full use of these adjustment settings can we achieve the perfect shooting effect we expect to the maximum extent.

Because of the long exposure time of the camera, the shutter speed is slow when shooting at night. Any slight vibration and shaking of the camera during shooting will lead to blurred picture. Therefore, the second weapon to shoot night scenes with lights is a solid and stable photographic tripod.

What will be equipped next varies from person to person. For example, when my OLYPMUS C2 100UZ camera shoots night scenes, I always take that handy shutter remote control. Users of digital cameras like Minolta D7 and D7i please bring your cable. These devices, like tripods, are used to ensure the stability of the picture when shooting.

First, whether it is a fully automatic digital camera or a digital camera with manual function, it is recommended to completely turn off the built-in flash when shooting. If you turn on the flash, first of all, it is impossible to illuminate such a wide range of vision, only electricity is needed. Moreover, after the flash is turned on, the camera often automatically increases the shutter speed, resulting in underexposure of the picture. After turning off the flash, even an automatic camera will slow down the shutter speed appropriately and generally get more adequate exposure.

Secondly, if your digital camera has an adjustable sensitivity (ISO) setting, I suggest you set the ISO value at the lowest level. This is because the higher the ISO value, the faster the photosensitive speed and shutter speed, but the picture particles will become thicker and even a lot of noise will appear. On the other hand, if the ISO value is low, the photosensitive speed will be slow, but the image quality will become very delicate and grainy. Many cameras will automatically increase the ISO value in the night scene to improve the sensitivity, but in order to ensure the image quality, it is more appropriate to manually fix the ISO value at the lowest gear.

Thirdly, due to the complexity of night light changes, I suggest that the average photometry method is more appropriate. If spot metering or key metering is used, I'm afraid it will easily lead to the problem that the local exposure of the picture is correct and most scenes are overexposed. This is especially common when shooting buildings with dark sky as the background.

Ok, put the camera firmly on the tripod. Don't forget to set the camera shutter to remote control or cable release control. In short, it is to avoid the screen shaking caused by pressing the shutter too hard. If there is no digital camera user with this function, just adjust the camera to the automatic time-delay shooting file. Many digital cameras can choose a delay of only 2 seconds, which is for this purpose.

So how to deal with the aperture shutter ratio and how to master the correct exposure when shooting city lights at night? Why are the night photos taken by many friends white in the light-obviously overexposed? How do we compose, view and shoot night photos?

In terms of photographic parameters:

My shooting habit is to set the digital camera to manual or aperture priority first, and the aperture is set to F5.0 or F5.6. Why do most consumer digital cameras choose this small aperture? Because when shooting at night, the light of the scene is definitely much darker than during the day, the autofocus system of consumer digital cameras is not easy to accurately control the focus in this case. If the aperture is too large and the depth of field is too small, sometimes the focus will not be accurate. Putting the aperture in a relatively small position can effectively ensure sufficient depth of field to represent the scene. Of course, I also think that the aperture should not be too small (F8, F 1 1), because this will make the camera extend the exposure time excessively. In the long exposure of CCD of consumer digital camera, due to the increase of working heat, it is easy to produce "hot spots" and destroy the image quality. Therefore, even if it is a digital camera with "noise reduction function", I think it is better to minimize the exposure time when shooting night scenes. So it's not too big or too small, and the aperture of F5.6 is more suitable for shooting night scenes.

As for the night scene exposure brightness, I found that many friends pressed the shutter when the camera reported an exposure of 0.0EV (accurate). In fact, when shooting at night, the value of the camera's automatic metering system is calculated according to the data in the daytime brightness range. If you listen to this 0.0EV and press the shutter, at least 80% of the night photos will be overexposed. According to my experience, when the camera reports that the exposure is 0.0EV, it is necessary to manually increase the shutter speed by 2-3 or reduce the aperture, so that the overall exposure can be reduced by two or three steps and the correct exposure can be obtained. Generally speaking, users are advised to manually adjust the exposure compensation from -0.7 to-1.0EV to obtain correct photos with appropriate scene level and no overexposure.