Night Photography Cheat Sheet – 9 tips

Have you attempted photographing at night or dabbled in night photography? The majority of us have attempted this to acquire an overexposed subject created by a powerful flash or a fuzzy photograph when no flash is employed. Night photography may be challenging, and you should be familiar with your camera’s settings. Night photography may be a lot of fun if you know what you’re doing.

Ravinda Joisa Photography - Night photography

The first thing you should do is set up a tripod. To achieve the greatest and sharpest image quality, you’ll need a nice robust tripod. When shooting night photography, utilize a wireless trigger or a cable release to eliminate any camera shake in the image. When you zoom in on the image, you can see that using the default release button causes a tiny camera to shake. For the shutter release, you can utilize inexpensive third-party camera attachments. You can employ the timer in the worst-case scenario.

Why are my night photos grainy?

When your scene is excessively dark, grainy images are the most usual result. If you don’t want to use flash to wash out the scene, you may compensate by increasing the ISO instead. The ISO determines the sensitivity of your sensor. Full frame and high-end cameras with larger sensors perform well in this area. Additionally, having a larger aperture will be beneficial. Having a high ISO alone will not improve your image. So, don’t fall for these marketing gimmicks.

What settings should I use for night photography?

Here in this article, I will be speaking about night photography and what settings to use to capture the night sky. Now that the tripod and trigger are ready, set the camera mode to Manual and choose the metering mode to Matrix. I recommend using a wide-angle lens like a 14-24 mm lens. In the above image, I have used a Nikon D600 body along with Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 lens.

What is the best ISO for night photography?

Others advise that the ISO be kept as low as feasible. I believe that with today’s cameras and sensors, you can obtain amazing shots even at high ISO without noise. To stay on the safe side and prevent noisy, overblown, or weird contrast photos, don’t go to the extreme end of ISO. If you have an older camera, I advocate keeping ISO as low as possible; but, if you have one of the more recent (Full-frame) cameras, you may want to increase ISO. I rarely use ISOs higher than 3200, preferring instead to use ISO 1600.

Dal lake at night lonely planet

How do you take pictures at night without flash?

The aperture should be about f16 and not too wide open. Try using a shutter speed of 20 or 30 seconds. Because the shutter is open for 20 seconds, keeping the aperture at roughly f16 makes sense (long exposure and to keep everything in focus). A shutter speed of moreover 20-30 seconds will make the stars appear to shake, however, this is not the case. Is caused by the earth’s movement. You may use bulb mode to capture star trails and long exposure photos.

You can even keep the aperture wide open to f2.8 if needed for long exposure shots and capture images like star trails or galaxy shots. When you keep the aperture wide open there will be enough light entering the sensor, so you can bring down the shutter too for galaxy shots, but for start trail, long exposures are the best. Basically, play around with the exposure triangle.

Is night photography hard?

The shutter speed is far too slow when the photographer takes the image, hence most night shots fail. If you shoot handheld for more than roughly 1/50th of a second, the image will be grainy; it’s simply not feasible to maintain your hands absolutely stable enough. Always use a tripod or secure your camera to a surface to prevent it from moving.

See that you choose a place that is dark. You might not want to do night photography when there is moonlight or in a city full of light pollution. I do this when I go to a village or in my hometown where there are no industrial or city lights. Check on the composition of the image. You may put something in the foreground but may appear dark when you do night photography. So, use a hand torch to light up the foreground and move it around, as shown in the first image where I have used torchlight (and a lamp) to light up the foreground/coconut trees.

Give it a try, let me know what you think, and share your pics in the comment below. Hope you have learned something today by reading this article. Buy me a coffee to support my work or you can go to my store to buy some of my images. Also, do not forget to join my FriendZone by signing up for my newsletter. Consider subscribing to my YouTube channel.

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