Night Photography
Hello everyone! This week we are going a slightly different route from the typical format of this blog. I happened to be in my hometown last weekend, and while there, decided to take advantage of the clear skies and good weather and do some night photography. This is something that I have recently become more interested in. I am definitely still learning, and I have a long way to go when it comes to night photography but, today I am going to share with you all how I take my photos and hopefully you can learn something!
A tutorial…kinda
Really all that you need to take photos at night or long exposures is a camera that you can set to manual or shutter priority mode and a tripod. I started out by taking panoramas and once it got dark enough to see the stars switched to a single frame photo.
Because your shutter is going to be open for so long taking the picture, you need to have a steady base to set your camera on. This will help reduce camera shake and make sure everything is in focus.
Time: 8:10pm Shutter speed: 1/20 Aperture: 5.6 ISO: 200
Once your camera is on your tripod, set it to either manual or shutter priority. For this session I started taking pictures at 8:10 and took another set every ten minutes to see how the changing light affected the pictures. For my first set of photos, my camera settings were as follows: shutter speed- 1/20, aperture-5.6, ISO-200. The only thing I changed throughout the night was the shutter speed. I used a 50mm prime lens.
Time: 8:20pm Shutter speed: 1/10 Aperture: 5.6 ISO: 200
Time: 8:30pm Shutter speed: 1/3 Aperture: 5.6 ISO: 200
For each round of photos, I lowered the shutter speed by two-ish clicks give or take a few. You kind of just have to play around with it depending on what works for you and your location. I started taking pictures right after sunset. For the first three photo sets there wasn’t much difference in the final photo. The biggest difference was the decreasing number of details in the shadows as it got later. Around 8:40 is when I really began to see the difference in the photos. The photo became more blue toned and the shadows were more intense. I took my final set of photos at 8:50. By this time, the picture was almost completely blue with just a hint of purple.
Time: 8:40pm Shutter speed: 1/2.5 Aperture: 5.6 ISO: 200
Time: 8:50pm Shutter Speed: 3 Aperture: 5.6 ISO: 200
At 9:00 I decided that it was too dark to try to take more panoramas, so I decided to try to shoot some stars.
At first, I had my shutter speed set to 10 seconds. At this speed, my photos were still turning out really dark and had little to no definition in the stars. I decided to make a big jump in shutter speed and set it to 30 seconds just to see what would happen. This did the trick! It made the sky look much more blue than black and allowed me to see even more stars. An unexpected result of this was catching the motion blur of the clouds. I thought it created an interesting effect and was pleased with the overall photo.
Time: 9:20pm Shutter speed: 30 Aperture: 5.6 ISO: 200
A bonus picture!
The moon was beautiful this night and I tried to take some pictures of it but I didn’t have a lens that would zoom far enough. Whenever I tried to take a picture it just looked like a white blob. When I got back to NKY I decided to try one more time to take a picture of the moon with my zoom lens.
Taking pictures of the moon is different from taking pictures of the stars. Since it is so much brighter, having your shutter open for a long time just blows the picture out and you lose all detail. Instead I had my shutter open and close very quickly. I was surprised how fast I could set my shutter to and how high I could set the aperture and still be able to see the details in the picture. For this picture I used a 70-200mm lens.
Time: 10:50 pm Shutter speed: 1/200 Aperture: 8 ISO: 100
I am very happy with how this photo turned out. I was surprised at how much detail my camera captured. It’s really cropped in so in the future I would like to try this again with a better quality lens/one that zooms in further.
These past couple of days have been a great learning experience with night photography. I can’t wait to practice and learn more and most of all, I hope you all learned something. Thank you for reading!