Setting up your camera properly for night or low-light photography is a fundamental key to successful images. There are no hard and fast rules for settings for night photography because many of the settings you choose depend on the scene before you and how you want it to look in the final image. However, this guide will give you a foundation for setting up your camera to capture the wonders of the night.
Photographs ©Todd Vorenkamp
Exposure Mode
The good news is that all exposure modes can and will be used in night photography. If your camera has a built-in flash, using Full Automatic mode may pop the flash and set your ISO for you. That is not always desired in night photography, but it can be in certain situations. Program Auto mode will not pop your flash but it will let the camera automatically set your aperture and shutter speed.
A great deal of night photography is done in manual mode, where the photographer chooses the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, but there may be times in which Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority work best. Aperture priority will allow you to control your depth of field or sharpness while letting the camera determine the shutter speed. Shutter priority can be used at night if there is movement in the frame and you want to capture a specific duration of that movement.
Note that most cameras, when in automatic modes, may have a limit to how much time the shutter can remain open. Some cameras max out at 30 seconds while others have considerably slower maximum slow shutter speeds. This limits your ability to use the automatic or semi-automatic modes.
Real-world scenario: Most night photographers will tell you never to use Program Auto at night, but when I was in the Persian Gulf and photographing a guided missile destroyer launching Tomahawk missiles in pitch-black darkness, I could not set the aperture and shutter speed fast enough in other modes to capture the launch. After missing photos of several launches, I switched to P mode and just concentrated on pointing the camera in the general direction of the destroyer. The camera did the rest.
Metering Mode
Metering mode controls how much area of your frame is measured for an exposure. Like exposure mode above, selecting a metering mode depends on the scene you are trying to photograph. In nature, nighttime scenes may not have a lot of contrast between sky and ground and, therefore, multi-segment or center-weighted metering is probably fine to use. In urban environments, or in areas with artificial lighting, you may want to experiment with spot metering or center-weighted metering to keep brighter regions of the frame from getting overexposed, or for drawing detail from dark areas at the expense of possibly blowing out highlighted areas.
White Balance
Digital cameras have the ability to change the way the sensor interprets the color cast of the image. This is done by setting the camera’s white balance to one of the presets (Tungsten, Fluorescent, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, or Flash) or by setting the WB to automatic mode wherein the camera tries to neutralize the color cast for you, or a preset mode where you can assign a color temperature between one of the presets.
Color cast is subjective and urban scenes at night can contain a variety of color temperatures in one image. Sometimes a warm cast fits a scene. Conversely, a cool cast works for others. There is no law governing the selection of white balance in digital photography. Some night photographers swear by shooting in Tungsten mode while in urban areas at night, while others prefer different presets. Personally, I shoot at night using auto (AWB) and then I tweak the colors later in post processing by neutralizing the image on a known gray or white area, or by accepting or introducing a cast that I feel helps convey the feel of the image.
ISO
Many discussions around night photography feature a conversation about ISO. In general, if you are doing night photography from a tripod, you will not need to raise your ISO as longer shutter speeds are possible due to the use of a stable camera support. So, in those cases, you want to set your camera to its native ISO setting. The native ISO setting of your camera is the one that is not electronically lowered or boosted. If you are not sure, you can likely find what that ISO is for your camera by searching the Internet.
There are instances when you must increase your ISO. Usually this happens when you are shooting in low light without a tripod, but there are scenarios when you are trying desperately to freeze action in the dark and you need to achieve the fastest shutter speed possible.
Real-world scenario: I was recently photographing a lighthouse that had red and white sectors. I was using a tripod and I wanted to freeze the action so that I could see the red and white beams of light separately. I opened my aperture all the way and still needed to increase the ISO in order to get the shutter speed to where I got the effect I wanted.
In summary, shoot at native ISO unless you have a very good reason to change it.
Image Quality
Shooting images in raw format is definitely the best solution at night. Raw images will give you the best performance in post processing when it comes to adjusting color temperature, removing noise, and many other considerations. If you are going to shoot JPEG files, be sure that you are shooting the highest resolution JPEG images available on your camera.
Noise Reduction
Camera companies have improved noise-reduction technology over the years, but you will be hard-pressed to find an experienced night photographer who supports the use of either High ISO Noise Reduction or Long Exposure Noise Reduction. High ISO NR is only applied in-camera to JPEG files and it reduces sharpness as it tries to remove noise. Long Exposure NR is a nice feature, but on most cameras it works by shooting a “dark frame” of the same duration as the photograph you just captured. So, if you just did a 30-minute exposure, your camera will spend another 30 minutes creating a dark frame to remove noise from the first shot and you are out of the photo business while the camera is creating and crunching that data.
The best noise reduction is done in post processing.
LCD Brightness
To help preserve nighttime vision, many photographers recommend turning the brightness of your digital camera LCD down to its lowest level. This certainly helps, but the inherent danger is that you might misjudge your exposure when reviewing images. If you are going to change your LCD brightness from its normal setting, be sure to verify your exposure using your histogram and by turning on highlight and shadow “blinkies” in the image preview.
Learn the Fundamentals, but Stay Flexible
As you can see, there are no specific prescribed settings for night photography. The night can be dynamic, so be ready to change settings on the fly, visualize what you want to capture, and do not be afraid to experiment with different settings.
How do you set up your camera for night photography? Please share some experiences in the Comments section, below, and help out your fellow nocturnal shooters!
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