Night shooting skills

Photography is the art of using up light, but if the ambient light is weak or even completely absent, such as at night, how can we take good photos? Here are the night shooting skills I shared. Let's have a look.

1. Equipment selection

First, you need a wide-angle lens. A tripod is an indispensable accessory. If there is a hook on the middle shaft, you can hang heavy objects to increase the stability of the whole tripod. Where the tripod is unstable, you can also prepare a rope to fix the tripod on the railing and other places. Finally, you can prepare a cable release, which can effectively avoid camera vibration when the shutter is pressed.

2. Shooting mode

For the city night scene in summer, it is suggested to choose the manual metering mode. The light ratio between buildings and the night sky is very complicated. If you shoot the aperture first, the camera may not be able to correctly judge the shutter value. Moreover, the automatic metering of the camera is easy to make mistakes when the light is uneven and the contrast is strong at night. In today's digital photography era, we can see the shooting effect in real time, so we can take more photos until we are satisfied. It is suggested that it is best to shoot when it is just dark and city lights begin to appear.

In addition, you can also use the camera's real-time framing with manual mode shooting, and you can see the exposure effect intuitively.

3. Parameter setting

Regarding the setting of parameter combination, everyone should learn to use it flexibly and make corresponding exposure compensation adjustment according to the actual shooting situation, so that the bright part of the photo will not be overexposed and the dark part will have details. If the light ratio still cannot be coordinated, HDR can be used.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

We can simply set the ISO sensitivity value to the lowest value of the camera's native sensitivity (don't use the extended low sensitivity).

hole

When determining the aperture, the depth of field is generally considered. In the aspect of city night scene, the scene is far from the camera, and it will not be blurred even if the maximum aperture is used. But because of the tripod, we don't have to worry about the slow shutter speed, so the aperture can still be reduced a little to get higher definition. At the same time, narrowing the aperture helps to give full play to the ultimate quality of the lens. I suggest you consider setting it between f/5.6~f/ 1 1.

shutter

Shutters need to be used with ISO and aperture. First of all, we should consider the brightness of the site environment and the lighting of the building. If there is a fluorescent lamp or luminous screen in the ambient light, it is recommended to set it between 1/25 seconds and115 seconds; If you shoot the light track, the speed will be even lower. I suggest you set a shutter value first, and then check it after shooting to know how long it will take to expose different night scenes.

4. Open the mirror for pre-lifting.

It is very important to stabilize the camera in order to take clear and sharp images. Generally, SLR cameras have the function of pre-raising mirrors. The principle is that the camera raises the reflector first, and when shooting by pressing the shutter, it can avoid the vibration when the reflector is erected and make the picture clearer. Generally, it will be used with cable release or remote control to minimize the vibration of the camera. If there is no cable release and reflector pre-lift function, you can use the countdown self-timer function, which will also stabilize the camera.

5. Other details

Turn on the long exposure noise reduction function.

Shooting night scenes usually takes a long exposure time, and digital photosensitive elements (CCD or CMOS) will generate heat when recording images, which will lead to noise in the picture. Nowadays, most digital SLR cameras have the function of long exposure and noise reduction. When this function is turned on, when you take photos with long exposure, the camera will first carry out internal noise reduction.

The disadvantage is that the waiting time is a bit long. If the exposure time is 30 seconds, the noise reduction time will be increased by 30 seconds, which means that it takes 1 minute to complete a photo exposed for 30 seconds, so it is necessary to decide whether to turn on this function according to the power of the camera.

Save photos in RAW file format.

When we shoot the night scene, the lighting will make the light source of the shooting scene very complicated, and many times we need post-processing to get better works. Therefore, it is best to use RAW file format to store photos when shooting at night, so that there will be more processing space in post-production, reducing the loss of details and maintaining the original quality of the picture to the greatest extent.

The difficulty of shooting night scenes is actually not high, so you can practice and shoot more. It is also a pleasure to enjoy the brightly lit city in front of you in the summer evening breeze. Finally, I remind you that in addition to photographic equipment, remember to bring a bottle of mosquito repellent.