Night Photography Without Fancy Equipment – A Bare Bones Guide

Feature, How To — By travis

night photography guide

Night photography has always captured my attention through its ability to transform some of our mundane, daily surroundings into dynamic sceneries of light and shadow. A setting that appears commonplace during daylight hours can take on a surprisingly new atmosphere at night. I noticed this affect at a public park near my house. In the park there is a playground; it’s painted with primary colors yet the overall brightness is muted by the uniformity of beige tanbark on the ground and the sun’s reflections on the metal surfaces during the day. When I returned at night, the park looked like a dark and contemplative film noir scene. The metal slides that were too drenched with light to photograph reappeared as ominous shapes in the night, a twisting blend of shadows and subtle reflections from street lamps in the distance.

Play Around

I experimented with night photography before I even had a tripod. I would place my camera on ledges, try every increment of shutter speed and use of the internal flash. Thanks to my rigorous tests, I discovered that I needed a tripod as soon as possible. Even with sunlight, it is nearly impossible to produce a photo without blur when using a shutter speed below 1/60 of a second. When photographing landscapes at night, I rarely use a shutter speed faster than one second. So, before running out to buy a tripod, try playing with your camera in the backyard at night. This will help you become familiarized with your camera’s sensitivity to light and the dependence on slow shutter speeds that is inherent in night photography.

Hunt for Spots

Since this is the BARE BONES guide to night photography, all you really need is a tripod. That’s right; no external flashes, no portable lights and no generators. All you need is your camera (set to its highest ISO), your trusty tripod and some kind of light source. Parking lots, parks, moonlit fields, urban views from the top of a hill, streetlights, traffic and store fronts all produce their own unique form of light. From the macro to the micro, you will find that each light source looks best with different shutter speeds. For a shot of the stars on a clear night, a shutter speed of a full minute or longer usually does the trick. To actually see the rotation of the earth, a six-hour shutter speed will produce long, curved streaks of stars moving through the sky. When photographing traffic moving quickly on a freeway below an overpass, any shutter speed longer than five seconds will probably make the image too bright. As you practice more, an intuition for the appropriate shutter speed for any type of setting becomes second nature.

The Great Indoors

One tradeoff for not purchasing all those extras (like lights) is that photographing a person outside with only a tripod can be very difficult. Even though it’s still possible to use the camera’s built-in flash to illuminate the subject and reduce the blur that would otherwise be visible from the subject’s movements, it’s difficult to avoid washing out all the color from the subject. This is where the exciting world of bars, concerts, dances and other nightlife gatherings comes into play. While there are interior lights at clubs and bars, the lighting is generally dim or dark. Using what you have learned about shutter speeds, you can apply the same principals to photographing people hitting the dance floor under a strobe light. Too much light from the ceiling reflecting on the dance floor will mean a faster shutter speed. Utilizing the motion of the crowd from a high vantage point, like a balcony, by allowing a blur to show up will require a slower shutter speed.

Night photography has its own cool look. With only a tripod and a camera, you can create images using available light sources while applying basic camera operating techniques.