Been a While, Eh?
Well, it's been a little too long since I wrote a post - apologies!
As discussed on the last post we went through the use of auto-focus lighting and how that can be a good thing and a bad thing. As it stands I said I was going to move on to long exposure and manual aperture control using SLR settings. That's still the plan - aren't you all lucky!
My limited experieces of this come from experimenting whilst over in Toronto with my dad, and once again while in Miami. There's also a bit of a bonus picture of some Astro-photography I tried from our back window! :)
First things first, what settings are we playing with here? The main settings we're looking to make use of to get some stellar night-time photography are:
- White Balance
- Shutter Speed
- Exposure Values/ ISO
The one that may not seem overly apparent at first glance is the white balance. White balance is usually best left on 'Auto' as it defines how 'warm' or 'cold' the image looks. If you open up the camera app on your phone and look through the view finder whilst changing you'll see what I mean - the first below image had the wrong white balance (forgive the bad photo in other respects :P) and the second image has the right balance and also a much better photograph in itself! :)
The shutter speed is hopefully evident as to why it's here. If you leave the shutter open longer, more light hits the sensor, things become brighter. During daylight this is a bad thing, making an image over-exposed all the way up to a pure white image. During the dark/ twilight, however, thing start to get better. It's at this point you realise just how good your eyes are at discerning light from dark.
The above images explain what I mean far better than I ever could. The image on the left had a shutter time of almost 18 seconds, whereas the one on the right had a shutter time of approximately 12 seconds. Whilst some of this difference can be regained during editing, if something is that overexposed too far then you'll never get that info back!
The exposure value (EV) or ISO of a camera can alter how bright things appear, at any given shutter speed. What it does is alter the sensitivity of the sensor itself - in conjunction with the shutter speed means that you can play around with some cool things. One thing this will help is for fast moving photography - sports, planes etc. If you up the sensitivity of the sensor you can decrease the shutter speed - this minimises motion blur.
What we need to do for long exposure is the opposite. Decrease the sensitivity and increase the shutter speed. Decreasing the sensitivity should decrease the noise level of the resulting image, and increasing the shutter speed should brighten up the image to a level where it matches (or exceeds) our eyes.
In the above you'll note the streak on the image - that's actually a plane flying by during the photo. This was taken with a 8 second shutter speed, not ideal - but it was on my mobile phone! It's been edited a fair amount, partially because the tripod wasn't level and partially because the phone had a lot of noise and the white balance was off. Editing will be covered much later in the blogs, so we will get on to that!
I've hopefully given you enough hints and tips to begin testing and playing around with things. I can't give you a template to make your night-time shots perfect, because every scene is different and every shot requires some slight tweaks.
I'll leave you with some final pictures, the above image was taken just outside Wantage, Oxfordshire on a clear night and the below was taken from a pier in Lima, Peru pointing back towards the city. Thanks as always for reading and I'll be back with another post early next week!
I have no idea what the next blog will be on, so suggestions on a post-card please! I may do a bit of a blog on focus, bokeh and how you can use it to your advantage - if I can think of a catchier title! :)