Question about night photography...

Hi,

Is it better to do night photography with a fast shutter speed and wider aperture and faster ISO or with a slower shutter speed and smaller aperture and slower ISO?

Want to try and get those rich deep colors that I see in other night time pictures. I know there is a lot of post processing that goes on and I do shoot in both RAW and jpeg large format.

Thanks in advance...
Al

use a tripod and your question aswered

That really depends on the look of the picture you are going for. Are you trying to "freeze" the action, like clouds or cars at a stop light so you can see them clearly? Or are you trying to let them blur and show motion a little bit. This will decide your settings, and post will help you get the picture to pop how you want it.

tripod

Tripod is really only one part of the answer. You can expose or do long exposures and make a cityscape glow. Different ways to do it.

Apart from postprocessing, the colors come from the time (bluer early at night than later, for example) and exposure. Colors won't be affected by how you get the exposure (slow shutter narrow aperture vs. fast shutter wide aperture). As Kawi said, other things determine the choice of shutter speed, such as the length of star trails you want. Another example: starburst patterns from lights require small aperture. When things like star trails are not an issue, smaller apertures are often better because focus is hard to manage in the dark, so greater DOF is a help.

A good starting point is Mark Bowie's The Light of Midnight.

Tripod is key as said before. For the blurred headlight look, slower shutter speed, then thats where a tripod or a non moving surface works best. Try n keep your iso low so you wont get too much noise. However that may affect your shutter speed as well.

I hate carrying around a stupid tripod, I shoot at ISO 3,200-5,000, F 1.7-2.8 and usually 1/200-1/400 because I want to stop motion blurr. I also meter for low key, about -1.5 on average.

Check out my blog below, plenty of night shots. Sure ISO 5000 isn't spotless but I now get shots that I could never when I lugged around 15 lbs of gear. I also went mirrorless because my DSLR got as cumbersome as a tripod.

Night time pictures - are you thinking city lights and cars or nightme skys and stars? Two different animals from a camera settings standpoint.

maverick75 wrote in post #16606192
I hate carrying around a stupid tripod, I shoot at ISO 3,200-5,000, F 1.7-2.8 and usually 1/200-1/400 because I want to stop motion blurr. I also meter for low key, about -1.5 on average.

Check out my blog below, plenty of night shots. Sure ISO 5000 isn't spotless but I now get shots that I could never when I lugged around 15 lbs of gear. I also went mirrorless because my DSLR got as cumbersome as a tripod.

Well, being too risky taking lowlight scenes at night using iso 5000
rather than bringing a stupid tripod

You could get a smart tripod (Less than 4 lb). - I hate those stupid 15 lb ones too!
However, at 1/200 - 1/400 you do get nice dark moody pix with -1.5 EC and high ISO.

All comes down to personal expectation and purpose/usage of the image.

If you care about your photography enough and want to create a noise-free image with maximum DR, you'd bare the weight and carry a tripod. Simple as that.

tongki wrote in post #16606286
Well, being too risky taking lowlight scenes at night using iso 5000
rather than bringing a stupid tripod

Use different gear for different needs. I always keep a tripod in my trunk but I rarely use it. Tripods are great for night landscapes and scenery and that's about it. If you're doing street photos there's nothing wrong with a little noise.

Chopper Al wrote in post #16605902
Hi,

Is it better to do night photography with a fast shutter speed and wider aperture and faster ISO or with a slower shutter speed and smaller aperture and slower ISO?

Want to try and get those rich deep colors that I see in other night time pictures. I know there is a lot of post processing that goes on and I do shoot in both RAW and jpeg large format.

Thanks in advance...
Al

Heya,

It depends what you're shooting!

Remember that wide aperture gives a shallow depth of field. But a narrow aperture increases depth of field. Wide aperture allows more light in over time, but, you lose depth of field to do that. So depending on what you're shooting, you may or may not want a wide aperture. If you're trying to do fast shutter speeds on things that move (people) in low light/night, then you have no real option other than wide aperture and bump up the ISO to a tolerable level to keep the shutter speed 1/focal-length (not counting IS if applicable). Otherwise, you just need a flash there. If you're shooting scenes, cities, landscape, the sky, etc, you can just open up the exposure for a longer time, with an average ISO, and narrow the aperture for depth of field and sharpness (with a tripod and shutter release, or timer). Also just know that the longer the focal length of the lens, the faster the shutter speed will have to be to keep it from being blurry due to motion. Shorter focal lengths work better for night photography, if you're not using it as a stationary camera (on a tripod).

Very best,

As with all photography really just remember that the worse thing you can do is to underexpose. Any hint of underexposure will lead to vastly increased noise especially in the shadows. Of course shooting at night makes this even worse and you can very quickly start adding huge amounts of noise to both the mid and three quarter tones as well. In my view it's even more important to Expose To The Right when shooting at night than during the day. Expose for the shadows where possible, as long as it's not way over the top blowing point light sources such as street lights is not going to matter really; they have no significant detail in them anyway. Sometimes you have to blow them quite a lot, the trouble is that in our artificially lit urban environments the dynamic range needed is just too much for our cameras to deal with. Both these images were shot ETTR and at ISO 1600 (the highest native ISO on my 20D) so that I could get detail in the darker areas without creating excessive noise. Exposed with the shadows in mind, and the highlights pulled back in the RAW conversion, converted using LR4.4.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …s/alan-evans/11260530445/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …s/alan-evans/11260664735/