seven secrets for the night
[Winston-Salem, NC]
the images above are two of many in a series of night portraits.. experimenting with available light and in this instance without a tripod. friends, do try this at home. tonight, i ran into a colleague at Krankie’s (one of my favorite venues/galleries/coffee shops in Winston.} she saw a handful of concert images and asked for tips on shooting in low light.. ISO, shutter speed, lens? two other photographers had asked for pointers earlier this week.. so i thought i’d share some of my favorites with you.
- bring a cell phone. have your subject hold it at his eyes (or the desired point of focus) and set your focus, then switch the lens to manual focus. if you are shooting aperture priority or anything other than full manual this will prevent the camera from adjusting to the shadow areas which may overexpose the image.
- remember when you shoot at night, it isn’t important to expose for the whole frame. set the exposure for the subject and let everything else fall into the background.
- if you start shooting in aperture priority and find an exposure that you like, remember it and reset it in manual. (this of course as well as the focus will have to be adjusted as you reframe.)
- don’t zoom. if you have a prime lens, use it. if you don’t have fixed aperture lenses, zoom all the way out to get the widest aperture possible then zoom with your feet!
- just because it’s night doesn’t mean you should push the ISO. sure, sometimes you’ll drop to 1600 but remember, you’re exposing to your subject. in the top image above the ISO was 400, metered to Brett’s face, not the whole picture.
- play with available light! you never want your flash to be obvious, so if you can get away without one, why not? we opened a window to capture the first image above and used a street light for the second. car lights, garden lights, and candles are also great light sources.
- make mistakes. give yourself plenty of time to mess up and learn from your mistakes, don’t get discouraged. so many photographers avoid night time completely because it’s a tricky time to shoot. when you get home, look at the metadata to figure out what worked and what didn’t and then get outside and keep shooting!
send along your thoughts on low light imaging along with photos you’d like to share, perhaps we’ll publish them in a future post :)
xo,
lauren