Tag Archives: bridge

Night photography – Lessons learned

Posted by Lyngstad-Creations.com on

It’s a long dark winter in Norway, and by the time I get home from work, there
isn’t much sunlight left to play with. So currently I’m working on developing my
night photography skills :-)

This is my lessons learned so far :

Eliminating camera shake

  • Use a tripod. If your tripod is light like mine, it might be a good idea to put some ballast on the tripod, to keep it extra steady.
  • Use a remote shutter, or set your camera’s self timer to 2 seconds.
  • Enable the mirror lockup function in your camera. This will leave the mirror open before exposure, and further decrease camera shake.

Adjusting focus

  • Always bring a powerful flashlight. This helps your camera to focus on those really dark spots. You can also use it for “light painting”.
  • Use a high f-stop, such as f9 or f10, this increases the depth of field, and ensures your image is in focus.

ISO speed

I prefer to keep my ISO settings as low as possible. An ISO of 400 is as high as I usually tend to go, the higher ISO, the more grain.

Shoot in RAW

This gives you the oppurtunity to adjust exposure, white balance,saturation, and so on in post production.

Bring a wide angle primelens or a zoom lens

I made a wrong choice and only brought my canon 50mm prime lens, and therefore had to struggle with framing my subjects.

A zoom lens gives you more options when it comes to composing the image.
Might just be that im lazy ;)

The stock-lens that came with your DSLR should work fine (18-55mm in my case)

So, what are your experiences? Any tips?