You don’t have to restrict yourself to daylight hours for shooting landscapes, you can shoot them during the night as well. And if you do, the team at Photoventure suggest some great lessons that you’ll learn along the way in their latest guest post.
1. The benefit of finding your location in advance
Many landscape photographers use bad weather and poor light days to check out potential shooting
locations, but this is essential with night photography.
And it’s not just a case of finding a scene that you think will work, you need to decide how you’re going to compose the image and what focal length lens you need while you can actually see the lie of the land.
You need to find your exact shooting position and decide the best angle and height to shoot from, ideally taking a few shots to be sure that you’ve nailed the composition.
It’s also a good idea to decide where you need to focus and determine how far that point is from your shooting position.
2. Get organised
Shooting at night makes you become really organised. You don’t want to be rummage around in your bag in the dark trying to find your remote release or a freshly formatted memory card. You need to know where everything is and be able to find it quickly.
A torch, ideally a headtorch, will come in handy when you are retrieving kit from your bag, but it’s no substitute for having well organised gear and knowing exactly where each lens is located.
Getting your kit properly organised in your bag will also help prevent accidental losses because you don’t have to pull lots of things out of your bag to find the item you’re looking for.
It will also pay dividends when shooting in daylight as you’ll be able to find what you want quickly, making you less likely to miss a shot or the fleeting light.
3. How to focus in low light
If you turn up at your shooting location before darkness descends, this won’t be an issue because you can set the camera up and focus the lens in the last light of the day.
But not everyone has the time to do this, and even those that do are likely to want to shoot more than one scene in a night.
Even very advanced autofocus systems struggle at night because they need to be able to see some contrast to operate.
This means that manual focus is required, but you need to be able to see the target just like the AF system does.
If your lens has a focus distance scale you can adjust focus until it’s at the distance you found when you checked out the location in daylight.
Alternatively, Live View mode can help as the gain that’s applied to the signal can reveal the scene giving you enough information to focus the lens.
You could also try shining a torch on your subject so you have enough light to focus, or you could put your torch next to the target and focus on it.
4. Low sensitivity is best for long exposures
High sensitivity settings can be very useful in low light when you want a short exposure, but when you’re shooting at night even very high settings will still require shutter speeds that are too long for hand-holding the camera.
High sensitivity settings also introduce lots of noise, which most photographers don’t want, so it’s usually better to use a low sensitivity and a long exposure.
Although mirror lock-up and a remote release are usually recommended for long exposures, with very long exposures the time it takes for any vibration to die down is insignificant, so they aren’t essential.
5. Using long exposure noise reduction
Long exposures usually introduce noise that results from variations in the sensitivity of the photo receptors across the sensor (including ‘hot pixels’), but unlike high-sensitivity noise, it tends to appear at the same locations.
The easiest way to deal with this noise is to use your camera’s long exposure noise reduction system.
Once it’s activated it usually kicks in when exposures are a second or more in length and it works by taking a second exposure of the same duration but with the shutter closed.
The camera then extracts the noise seen in the ‘dark frame’ or second exposure, from the image exposure to produce a clean shot.
It all happens automatically and it works very well, but it doubles the time each shot takes to produce.
This isn’t a problem with exposures of just a few seconds, but it can become tedious with exposures running to several minutes.
Some photographers therefore prefer to turn off long exposure noise reduction and capture their own dark frames periodically to remove the noise on their computer.
6. Control your camera by feel
Even if you’ve got a headtorch it can be difficult to see the buttons, dials and markings on your camera, so it’s much better to find the controls you need by feel.
Once you’ve used a particular control in the dark a few times you’ll find that you start to reach for without searching for with your eyes.
After a few hours shooting in the dark you’ll get to know your camera much better than ever before.
7. There’s light that you can’t see
The night sky usually looks pretty dark, but long exposures often reveal a few hidden light sources.
If you’re in the countryside shooting towards a town or city, for example, you are likely to find that the lower part of the sky glows orange.
This can be used to good effect, creating the appearance of sunset long after the sun has gone down.
8. The moon moves
The presence of a full moon in the sky above a night time landscape makes a huge difference to the exposure time of your photographs and the soft light it adds (reflects) helps give the landscape greater form.
It’s well worth planning your shoot around the phase of the moon (as well as the weather) to get a little illumination.
However, if you’re shooting long exposures it’s often advisable to avoid including the moon in the frame as it moves surprisingly quickly across the sky and ends up looking misshaped.
You could, however, consider taking two shots with different exposures; a short one to record the moon looking round and a second longer one of the landscape and then cloning out the elongated moon and replacing it with the normal shaped one to create a natural looking composite.
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