Night photography is a true passion for those who love the darkness of the evening and the atmosphere created by the lights of the city. Night photography, which is the most used area of fantastic photo shooting techniques, is tried by every photographer, whether amateur or professional. If you are wondering how to take night photos, what are the techniques of night photography, you will find the answers to your questions on this article.
What is Night Photography Technique?
When we say how to take night photos, we need to consider all the variables together. Shooting is done by calculating the contrast, color, power and direction of the light. Photography courses give you this information. Since the lights of the city will not be sufficient during night photography, you should use dark areas and buildings as a photographic element in your shots. You should know the basic techniques of night photography, creating light and composition in the dark. It will be difficult to use natural lights when taking photos at night. In order to see any object, that object must reflect light. Therefore, your object should be illuminated.
The biggest challenge for night photography art
The biggest challenge when you want to take photos at night is the color distortion caused by natural light. Polarized lights may not look the way you want. While the color temperature of the artificial light source is constant, this situation is variable in natural light. Therefore, color ambiances create advantages and disadvantages during night photography.
Key elements for night photography work
- SO Setting and Shutter: If you say how to take night photos, you should first know the ISO and shutter settings. You can adjust the settings according to the effect you want to create. If we are going to take a still photo at night, we can get a clean photo by keeping the ISO value at the lowest (eg 50 – 80 or 100) and long exposure. If we are going to take a moving night photo, we need to work with the openest diaphragm and high ISO.
- AF Focus: Manually adjust your focus by zooming in a digital preview. Set AF to manual. If you are going to take a moving night photo, you have to use AF automatically or manually follow it continuously.
- White balance: White balance has special importance among night photography techniques. You can adjust your setting according to the light temperature of the subject to be shot. Decreasing numerically in Kelvin setting (4000 3700 3500 3200 2700) will give you cold blue colors, and increasing numerically (4500 5000 5300 5700) will give you warm yellow tones.
- Diaphragm Setting: The diaphragm setting for night photography is different from shooting during the day. To get clear photos during night photography for different purposes such as fashion photography, normal photography and etc. , you need to turn down the diaphragm. If you want to blur the background or take photos with bokeh, you can turn the diaphragm open.
- Noise Prevention: When applying night photography techniques, it is necessary to prevent vibration. For long exposure, fix your camera on a tripod and hold down the shutter button when using anti-vibration modes. If you do not hold down the shutter button, the anti-vibration feature stops.
- Timer: One of the other photography techniques, you should pay attention to is the use of the timer. You can minimize vibration by using the remote control, Cable Shutter, or your camera’s built-in timer feature. You have to shoot in Bulb mode to take a long exposure for more than 30 seconds.
