What’s up guys my name is Donovan Wagner and today we’re gonna talk a little bit about night photography.
I have a lot of people ask me how to do night photography and I think it’s definitely something we all try to experiment with more first starting out because it’s a lot of fun and it’s different. So there’s three things you really need to focus on with night photography and those three things are: your shutter speed, aperture and ISO. They all work together but in very different ways. So the first thing to consider with night photography is your shutter speed. It depends on what kind of photo you’re trying to take at night whether it’s cityscapes or landscape photos or if you’re trying to take portraits of somebody like Brandon Wolf whole style with neon signs. They’re all very different.
If you’re shooting landscapes or cityscapes and you want that long exposure effect like that you see with light trails with cars or maybe the star trails that you see on Instagram then you want to slow your shutter speed right down even as low as 30 seconds long.
The second thing to think about when doing night photography is your aperture. We all know that when you have a wider aperture it allows more light here sensor but there’s also some cool things you can do when you turn the aperture to a high number with night photography.
If you’ve ever seen a photo where the lights give off a starburst kind of effect that’s because somebody turned their aperture really high and that’s the light actually wrapping around the blades inside your lens. If you want to shoot a landscape or cityscape and you don’t necessarily care about those lighting effects you typically want to go as low as your lens will go for an aperture and that just lets more light in therefore you don’t have to have as long as shutter speed.
The third thing to consider with night photography is ISO. So this is the third and final part of the formula when you’re starting out with night photography and it’s probably what scares most people from trying night photography because we associate high ISO with graininess or noise and I think we just need to let that mindset go. I mean don’t let that hold you back from taking a cool photo. ISO is just your camera sensitivity to light so we all know the lower the number the less grain and the less sensitive your sensor is to light and the higher the number the more sensitive it is to light typically makes your photo brighter but the consequence to that is the graininess or noise in the photo but I mean Lightroom and Adobe products now you can turn noise reduction on and you’ll barely even notice that especially for ninety percent of us using our photos on Instagram or Facebook it’s still totally usable. A lot of beginners often think night photography means you have to just flash because naturally when you have your first DSLR it has a pop-up flash it’s gonna pop up when it reads a low light situation flash.
With night photography is a whole other thing and do not worry about using flash and the final thing I want to touch base on is sensor size. So if you’re shooting on a Micro Four Thirds camera or an aps-c crop sensor DSLR or a full-frame 35 millimeter sensor those all react differently in the light. The bigger the sensor the more light can hit that sensor there for a full-frame will be better in low light than a micro four-thirds but don’t let that hold you back these cameras are all really great and they will handle high ISO better than you think so just get out there experiment with it.
If you find night photography is something you want to explore more of then maybe look at investing in bigger sensor camera but when you’re starting out just get out there and try new things I hope this helps and if you guys have any questions about my photography or anything just leave a comment below and I will reach out to you thank you for watching and make sure you subscribe.
