Experience of shooting city night scenes

Lead: Many beginners of photography will find night scenes more difficult to control than daytime scenes. You can easily take a picture of the daytime scene with your camera, but you can't take a picture of the night scene without a tripod, and you need to release the cable, so the photos you take are either too bright or too dark. In fact, as long as you master some tips, beginners can easily shoot night scenes.

Shooting experience of urban night scene shooting equipment

To take a night view of a city, it is generally necessary to prepare a tripod and a cable, but the lens is basically not too limited, and it is generally better to prepare a wide-angle lens.

What is worth mentioning is the tripod. The camera bag can be hooked on the central axis of the tripod to strengthen the center of gravity of the tripod. On the other hand, sometimes in some cases, such as the tripod is not high enough, we can consider the contingency method to make the camera shoot stably. Sometimes I put my feet on the railing and the whole camera is stuck outside the fence, but remember, safety is the most important thing, don't drop the camera because of this. The camera can be tied with a camera neck strap, and then when shooting, you can release it with the cable in one hand and the camera strap in the other.

Photography point

Urban night view refers to the lights reflected from the external walls of high-rise buildings and photos taken by different buildings. To take this kind of photo, we should first consider where to take it. Think about where you can see more tall buildings (yes, but not in a group of tall buildings). Take two popular locations as examples. One is the top of Taiping Mountain overlooking Victoria Harbour. The other is Tsim Sha Tsui Avenue of Stars. Both are hot spots for tourists and filming. The top of the mountain has a view from high to low; The Avenue of Stars has a horizontal perspective.

Decide on a good place to arrive at the scene, first look for lights to see if there are any special light sources or special reflective effects. For buildings of average height, try to choose one as the main body, such as particularly high, particularly colored, particularly bright and so on.

weather

The weather is basically nothing serious, even if it rains, you can take pictures. If the sky is clear, it will be darker, in sharp contrast with the lights of the building; If there is mist in the sky, it will be brighter In terms of clouds, a little cloud is ideal, but it is not a dense cloud. With the slow shutter, you can also shoot the effect of cloud flow.

Camera settings

This article is a beginner's introduction, so I hope beginners can get in touch with night scenes as much as possible, and then explore, so the setting is as simple as possible. When deciding the setting of each photo, we should first consider the aperture value, shutter value and ISO value.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

Let's talk about ISO first. Because we all use tripods, we won't clap our hands to blur the photos. To do this, we can simply set the ISO value to 100.

hole

When determining the aperture, the depth of field is generally considered. In the night scene, because the scene is too far away from the camera, in many cases, the camera will be set to infinity after focusing. Even if the scene has a front and a back, the front scene is far away, so even if the maximum aperture is used, the photos taken will not be blurred. However, because of the tripod, we don't have to worry about the slow shutter, so we can still narrow the aperture to get it. In terms of setting, I suggest you consider setting from f/7.1-f/1. If other circumstances need to be considered, such as extending the line of street lamps, it can also be set to about f/ 16. If you still find it difficult to decide, you can directly set the aperture to f/9, which is a very safe setting.

shutter

Shutter is the most important consideration. First of all, we must decide the brightness of the scene environment, and also decide whether the lighting of the building will be too bright and too dark. At this time, it is only decided by the photographer's experience, and the time is also 5 seconds to 2 minutes. This sounds complicated, but in fact, whether you can shoot this night scene depends largely on the setting of the shutter. I suggest that you can decide a shutter value yourself. After shooting, look at the finished photos for your reference. Too bright will slow down the shutter, too dark will lengthen the shutter. With this practice, you will soon know how long each night scene needs to be exposed.

Other settings

For the camera, you can also set the exposure delay mode (Nikon's name) to reduce the vibration caused by the rising mirror.

In addition, you can also turn on the camera option to reduce the noise of long-term exposure. Because the longer the exposure time, the more noise. This function is used to reduce the resulting noise. However, it should be noted that this function will process each photo after shooting. Generally, the time is equal to the exposure time, that is, the exposure time is 1 min, and the processing time will be 1 min. Exposure to 1 hour, treatment will take 1 hour.

In terms of white balance, if you don't know much about it, it is recommended to shoot RAW files first, shoot with automatic white balance, and then adjust the white balance with a computer after shooting. The lights at night are unpredictable, and there is no certain setting. I am used to setting the white balance K manually. As far as the numerical value set by the camera is concerned, the smaller the numerical value, the colder the photo color (blue), while the larger the numerical value, the warmer the photo color (red). Shoot the RAW file, and then adjust it in the computer to see the differences of each setting, so as to achieve different white balance effects.

In terms of P/A/S/M mode, although many people are used to shooting with aperture first, M mode is recommended for city night scenes. At night, the contrast between each building and the sky is different, so if you shoot with aperture priority, the camera may not be able to determine the shutter value correctly. Aperture priority will not set the shutter value for more than 30 seconds, but will only limit the shooting situation. Therefore, it is safer to choose M mode directly, and it is safer to customize the aperture and shutter value, so simply adjust the shutter to Bulbo to cooperate with cable exposure.

Photography has no theorem and formula, so you have to try it yourself. Every scene is different, and there is no unique shooting method. This article is for reference only, hoping to arouse the novice's interest in night shooting and solve the simple shooting problem. After the night scene shooting is successful, you can study each set value by yourself and get the desired effect.