Calling Your Shots at Night
August 27, 2008
Some All Time Greats
If you dig deeper, you will certainly come to find that the early 1900s can be regarded as the golden age of night photography. This was the era when titans of this sphere like Brassai, Genthe, Stieglitz and Steichen, ruled the sector with their classic nocturnals. 1920s and 30s saw a good number of photographers aligning with the Surrealist Movement started working at night and what more, even a good number of their day photographs as well, bore nocturnal touch. One of those stalwarts was an Englishman called Bill Brandt, who too like the others loved the darkness of night more than anything else. He strived to reveal war-time as well as post-war industrial England. Then, if you have come across a famous (or notorious) photograph that depicted the burning of Hitler's house, you obviously have savoured the artistry of a woman photographer known to the world as Lee Miller, who specialised in conceiving night images of the second world war. You should also be pondering over the legendry “Moonrise over Hernandez” realised by the great Ansel Adams that was explained with the sense of mystery brought about by a cryptic combination of a darkened sky, moonlight and above all the blanket of dusk.
Challenging
Photography at night hours, more often than not, proves to be challenging for even a consummate professional. At times even shooting with a digital SLR would tend to emulate the process with a film camera. The long waits for results that follow the setting of long exposures that ranges from 3 to 5 minutes, the high margin of error and the fast changing natural ambience calls for the precision-sense in you. That says, you should be precisely knowing the culmination of that reading with which, you intend to shoot and should always be capable to explain why not, with another combination. Moreover, holding the camera for long periods due to some long shutter speeds that hover around anything between 10 to 30 seconds is quite demanding as you can imagine. This is even more deteriorated with the hassle of blurring at the instance of the minutest camera shake.
Packing for an Event
To optimise your night photography results, apart from your medium format or 35mm camera with the options of manual controls and time setting (bulb), you would find these thing handy;
A notepad and writing devices for noting down exposure variations
A good tripod
Any Digital Timer
Any sort of small flashlight
Extra Batteries for the Camera
Locking Cable Release
Lens tissue to clean the lens in foggy conditions
A plastic bag to cover the ccamera in foggy conditions
Exploit the circumstances to the maximum
We earlier discussed the hassles of longer shutter speed or bulb shooting along with the inconvenience of holding the camera for longer periods due to the same reasons. The ideal solution here, is the engagement of a sturdy tripod, with which, you can set long exposures for your digital camera. You are at peace of mind too with no worries, such as camera shakes irking you. Implimenting an external shutter release device, can virtually eradicate the hazard of camera shakes, though, this can be effectuated only if your camera supports this device. We are obviously talking about the spoilsport called blurring. However, you cannot take blurring as undesired at every instance of photography, certainly not, if you are a thorough professional. For you know that at times blurring can be harnessed to merge harmoniously with creativity. For example, those blurrs resulted from speeding cars at night time on a motorway, which can be optimised if the motorway is next to a lit cityscape or skyscraper. Another fine tip here, is all about increasing the ISO speed of your digital camera, for higher the ISO speed, better the tolerance of quicker exposures. This is increasingly significant while shooting in the absence of a tripod. More precisely, you might find it extremely demanding to maintain your digital camera still for 1/15 th of a second or perhaps longer in order to keep blurring at bay by obtaining the ideal light for that scene. Here, a higher ISO setting would definitely relieve you by making the camera tolerate a 1/30 th of a second exposure or quicker. However, you must also be familiar to the fact that an increased ISO setting is always accompanied by an increased amount of noise.
When?
Even though a genuine night-photograph refers to something conceived an hour or so after sunset, the best advice for you would be to seek your target at or shortly after dusk. This is for, the ovverall light amounts to an explicit balance of natural as well as artificial light at this point of time, while the mood obviously refers to night. This can be significant if you look to nighttime cityscape photography. At dusk, the sky though appears dark would felicitate some amount of sunlight enter your camera. This makes it easy for you to capture handheld photographs with lesser fear of camera shake hazards. As the old proverb goes, 'All good things have to end', the dusk is also short lived, at least for a day. Considering this fact, you can locate you shooting sites beforehand. Checking in the weather websites for the sunset time would also do you a world of good.
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