Everybody enjoys a fair share of sunshine but there is this surreal quality that night time experiences tend to have. The world looks different at night.
The stars come out, the cities light up, the sky reflects a glow of the skyline, sometimes faithfully, sometimes distortedly. This interaction between artificial light and its surroundings, if captured, can produce surreal images.
Unlike daytime photography, taking pictures at night requires planning, it requires thought, patience, and the right gear. In the world of the smartphone camera shot, you could be capturing these beautiful moments without having to carry around a bulky DSLR.
Here are a few tips that will help you capture the night time world in all its glory with your smartphone.
Getting the Focus Right
If you’re shooting at night, getting the focus on your subject can prove to be challenging. Unless you have night vision or really good eyesight for manually focusing, you’re going to want to use something like a flashlight. You can use a flashlight until the camera finds the focus. If you tend to shoot alone you might want to get a phone which features a Laser Autofocus Camera which helps the camera focus accurately on your subject.
Control Your Light by Opening the Aperture
The key thing that you’ll be aiming for when shooting portraits at night is bringing up those ambient light levels so your subject isn’t in complete darkness. How do you do it? It’s pretty easy, you just have to widen the aperture. Yes, that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Tune Down the Shutter Speed!
You’re also going to have to slow down your shutter speed to bring up the ambient light even further. Use a tripod to keep your phone very still unless you have really stable hands to avoid camera shaking.
Raise That ISO
Depending on the scene you’re in, slowing down the shutter speed might not be enough. So, you may consider raising the ISO. Overdoing it might result in noise taking over the image so be extra careful with it.
Use the Backlights
During the day, you have the sun to use as a secondary light source to separate your subject from the dark background that might be around it. At night you don’t have that sun. So, you need to have a second light source like a backlight to create that separation. If your subject is wearing something dark, they will easily blend into the darkness but we want to avoid that. Therefore it’s important that you create the separation.
Be Careful with Your Colours
If you have multiple lights on your subject you might get an odd color due to varying color temperatures. This can confuse the mood of the photograph. For this, I recommend putting your subject in a scene where there is little to no light in front of them. In addition to being careful about the ambient light sources, you should also keep in mind how you want to put those ambient lights to use.
Use the Flash When Needed
Other than when you need landscape photos, photography with flash works just fine. There are a couple of ways by which you can be creative with your beam of light. You could use a tissue to soften the harsh white light or use a color filter to give it a different look. Either way, flash works great at night with portrait shots.
Jackson Henry I’m a writer living in USA. I am a fan of technology, arts, and reading. I’m also interested in writing and education. You can read my blog with a click on the button above.
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