Settings For Night Photography

Nothing spoils your night photos like soft subjects and odd colour casts. Below and on the following pages we’ll introduce some of the key night photography settings you should use in order to get pictures with real impact. We’ll not only show you how to set up your camera for night photography, but offer night photography tips for controlling your colours, planning yours shoots and more.

Stepping out into the night and shooting the darkening sky can be one of the most exhilarating ways of expanding your photographic repertoire.
You can reveal a whole new world by shooting night photography, and end up with some much more satisfying images than the usual rather predictable stuff taken at sunrise or sunset.
The really good news is that it’s not all about high-end camera kit. Modern DSLRs are highly capable, even at the beginner end of the market. Nor does your set-up have to include an array of exotic prime lenses, since any lens and digital camera can have you reaching for the starry heavens far more easily than before.
Night photography isn’t all about shooting into a black viewfinder and guessing at compositions. For a simpler start, use the full moon to illuminate the landscape.

Use moonlight to illuminate your scene

Moonlight is a neutral, white light that almost looks like a massive flashgun has lit up the land. Start by picking a favourite and well-known location that’s within easy reach of the car.
Put the camera on a tripod, choose the manual mode to give you more control over your night photography settings, and then select a wide aperture (f/4, for instance).
You’ll also want to include a high ISO value (such as ISO 800) and a shutter speed of about 30secs among your night photography settings (find out how to reduce noise at high ISO settings). Fire off the shutter using a cable release and marvel at just how much unseen detail your camera has recorded.

Use a high ISO to accentuate a starry sky

If you’re looking for a truly cosmic photo, capture the dark night sky instead. The light levels will be a lot lower than moonlight, but you can compensate for this by using a higher ISO setting.
Choose ISO 3200. This will record thousands of stars, but don’t expect the camera to pick up any details in the landscape, such as a moonlit hilltop.
Night photography is all about letting go of image conventions. The light is so greatly reduced that the pictures will consist of photographic taboos, such as featureless shadows, but don’t let this inhibit you.
When you begin processing your night photos on a computer, don’t be afraid of using noise-reduction software. Most raw converters, such as Adobe Camera Raw, do an admirable job of bringing down noise levels. The Luminance slider provides the best control of noise reduction without decreasing detail.
Try applying the noise reduction in two stages: once in raw and then again using Photoshop CS’s Noise Reduction tool, which enables you to tackle the issue in separate colour channels using the advanced options. You’ll often find that one colour channel 
in particular will contain most of the noise.
If your noise-reduction efforts in Photoshop prove to be unsuccessful, try taking a ‘dark frame’ during your next shoot and subtracting it from the subsequent pictures.
Open your dark-frame image and the night photo you want to process in Photoshop. Copy and paste the dark frame into a new layer on top of the image and select the Difference blending mode (learn more about blending modes and the 10 best blends for photographers).
Your first shoots may not be successful, but once you gain some knowledge of how and where to shoot, night photography becomes an extremely enriching experience. With good camera technique and careful processing skills, your images can be breathtaking.

3 key night photography settings every photographer should use

Shoot wide
Keep the aperture setting as 
wide as possible. If you don’t have a fast prime lens (such as 24mm or 35mm f/1.4) then f/4 is a good compromise. Make sure you test your lens in the daytime to see how sharply it performs with the aperture wide open.


Boost the ISO
Make the camera sensitive to 
low light by selecting a much higher ISO than normal. If you’re shooting in moonlight, the value doesn’t need to be any greater than ISO 1600, but choose ISO 3200 for dark, starry skies with little illumination.


Customise shutter speed
Make sure the shutter speed is 
no longer than 30 secs. If it is, 
star trails will start to form and the stars will lose their definition. Make use of your DSLR’s self timer or a cable release to ensure that your hands are off the camera when the shutter fires.

Control your colours

Fine tune your white balance for better hues
With your camera set to automatic white balance, night photos will tend to look rather blue.

Auto White Balance

This is because, even though our eyes are only seeing a world in monochrome, the camera is still being presented with a blue sky.
By shooting raw files, it’s possible to fix this problem at the processing stage. Simply choose a warmer white balance – somewhere around 5000K should suffice – and the picture should better resemble how you saw the night scene.

Warmer White Balance

Make sure your white balance isn’t pushed up too far though. If it is, the ground will start to look unpleasantly yellow or brown, which can end up being worse than an overly blue image

Final tips for your night photography shoot

Plan your shoot
If you live in a town or city, it’s best to get as far away from street lighting as you can. If you don’t, you’ll find that sodium lights create a strong and disagreeable orange colour cast. For the best results, choose night scenes as far from urban areas as possible.
Prefocus

Switch off autofocus and make sure the camera is focused at infinity. The slightest error will create soft-focused images. After you’ve taken the first shot, check that your focusing is correct by reviewing the picture on the camera’s LCD.
Find a solid base
Make sure your tripod is mounted on a solid base, preferably a rock surface. 
This will prevent any movement during the exposure times. If you don’t have a heavy tripod, hang your camera bag from the centre column (most modern tripods should have a hook for this purpose).
Disable in-camera noise reduction
In-camera noise reduction takes a blank exposure, which doubles your exposure times and applies indiscriminate noise reduction. This can have a detrimental effect on image aesthetics. Use specialised computer software to handle the problem back home.

- Digital Camera World