Friday Photography Tips #10 - When the Sun Goes Down
Just because the sunlight is ending doesn't mean your photography has to.
The setting of the sun usually signifies the end of the photographic day for many photographers. But as the natural light fades it is replaced by artificial light or moonlight a whole new world can appear through the viewfinder.
The 'blue hour' is a short period of time after the sun has set, when the light in the sky is the same power as artificial lights (such as the lamp on the bike pictured above). This is an interesting time to photograph cityscapes as it allows cloudy skies and streetlights to be captured in the same image.
1. Street Lights
Bright streetlights combined with a wet reflective ground makes for wonderful lighting conditions. The image above shows Christmas shoppers on Dublin's busy Henry Street. The Irish word for the city of Dublin is shown in lights at the top of the frame Baile Átha Cliath (town of the hurdled ford).
As it's unlikely that light fill all of your frame, night photography is often about learning to embrace the shadows. Remember to look for reflections that will double up some of your light sources, like the image above captured along a Birmingham canal.
2. Go with the Grain
The ISO (which unhelpfully just stands for 'International Organisation of Standardisation'), is a control on your camera that adjusts the light sensitivity. Basically, a higher ISO boosts the light signal to the sensor, meaning it will need less light to capture an image. Using a higher ISO value comes at the cost of introducing noise (grain) to your photograph and decreasing colour accuracy. The noise that's introduced can actually add an interesting texture to an image.
Because of the lack of colour fidelity, I tend to convert a lot of my high ISO images into black and white. For my personal taste and the results I get with my cameras (ISO results vary wildly across different models of cameras), I would class 'high ISO' as anything above ISO 1600. At really high values the image will start to 'fall apart' (i.e. lose more and more detail) but in really low light situations you may have no other choice but to increase the ISO or...
3. Use Long Exposure
A tricky technique to get right, long exposure photography involves keeping the camera as still as possible (using a tripod or a flat stable surface) and slowing the shutter speed down to get the right exposure. Whilst taking a night-time stroll in Australia, I noticed how the night sky was lighting up an umbrella. It made me think if there was a place in the world you could 'star-bathe' it was probably Australia. The image above is an eight second exposure using a tripod, long enough to capture the stars in the sky and crucially for enough light to hit the umbrella.
Light trails are another reason to try long exposure photography, one of the hardest parts is finding an interesting enough composition that will also have lights moving through it. Timing can be difficult and it's really a matter of trial and error. The image above shows traffic flowing from one tunnel in the city to another. While trying to capture this image, traffic would occasionally build up and instead of getting a long steady flow of light, it would just be short lines where the cars only moved slightly.
In a long exposure image, darker moving objects become practically invisible. In the image of Newcastle's Gateshead Millennium Bridge (otherwise known as the 'Blinking Eye Bridge') an 8 second exposure has smoothed out most of the waves and ripples in the water, allowing a nice reflection of the scene above. People walking across the bridge are likely to be invisible or just a ghost-like blur, thankfully for the composition a couple has remained mostly still at the very centre of the shot. Whomever they are I am grateful for their loitering.
Whether you're near a city (that doesn't sleep) or cloudless sky in the countryside, take the lens cap off and keep being creative. For the city slickers be vigilant and consider others when you place a tripod; for the country folk bring a torch and be careful where you step. Stay safe everyone!
Happy Friday,
Tom
