Way before Martin Luther first used candles on a Christmas tree to depict the stars lighting up the heavens, light played an important role in our Christmas celebrations. The Romans placed oil lamps in living trees to celebrate their festival of Saturnalia, and the Vikings burnt Yuletide logs to safeguard the sun. Today, most homes and towns light up for the festive season. Whether it’s your family decorations, the traditional lights around the harbour in the little Cornish fishing village of Mousehole or the grand Regent Street illuminations in our capital city, there are opportunities wherever you live to capture the glitter and sparkle of Christmas.
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Night scenes are often difficult to capture successfully. What you see is a magnificent floodlit square with facades lit up by warm, glowing lamps. You set the camera up on your tripod or a solid surface, switch off the flash and fire the shutter. What you get is a messy image full of flare, burnt-out patches of white and areas of black. What has gone wrong?
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You’ll find all kinds of things to photograph when the sun goes down, and each one requires a somewhat different technique. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
The moon
When shooting the moon, remember that it is a very bright object.The Sunny 16 Rule may work for you in this situation, but I’ve found that many cameras get confused by the dramatic variation in brightness with shots like this, so you may need to experiment a bit. If you can get enough magnification out of your lens so that the moon fills up at least half of the frame, you’ll need to shoot a fairly fast shutter speed or even set the EV value to underexpose the frame. And be sure to use a tripod.
Sunset
The sky is full of rich, gorgeous colors around sunset. Base your exposure on the sky itself, not your subject or anything on the ground. And take a few extra pictures, bracketing your exposure to make sure you get the shot.
Dusk
I have found that photographing lighted buildings and headlight trails works particularly well when you can get the rich blue colors of dusk in the sky at the same time.
Taking pictures at night is a rewarding, exciting activity; unfortunately, digital cameras don’t always make it easy to do. On the plus side, taking pictures with a digital camera is essentially free, since you’re not buying film. So you can experiment to your heart’s content without wasting any film.
Not every camera is cut out for night photography. Low-light photography requires long exposure times; if your digital camera is not capable of shutter speeds of one second or more, you will probably have some trouble getting decent night shots. In fact, your camera should have a manual exposure mode so you can dial in the shutter speed by hand. Automatic exposure settings may not give you anything even remotely interesting. If you’re shopping for a camera and are specifically interested in night shots, try to get a camera with a bulb setting—that’s photography lingo for a shutter that stays open for as long as you hold the shutter release down—or at least a maximum shutter speed of 8 seconds. Not all night exposures are measured in seconds, though. See the night picture—in the Color Insert—I captured with only about a one-second exposure, something any digital camera should be able to do.
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So, you’re ready to take your first pictures at night. I recommend that you choose an interesting locale to begin with. Go downtown, where there are lots of neon store lights and cars with headlights on. Alternately, try a local carnival or fairground. The idea is to find a location that has lots of interesting lights and motion.
To take your first nighttime pictures, follow these steps:
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Nighttime portraits can be extremely interesting, especially when your subject is in front of a lit monument or building. The key to this shot is a very wide aperture, to admit as much light as possible. You can use nighttime flash mode, but if your camera has aperture-priority mode, you can get more control over the results. Either way, use a tripod and follow the general guidelines for twilight portraits in the previous section.
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Twilight is a magic time for photographers. The setting sun bathes the landscape in a warm glow, providing a beautiful backdrop for portraits. Twilight’s an ideal time to shoot any type of picture. The result can be an incredibly striking image that makes your travel pictures the talk of the office. It’s a great technique when shooting somebody standing in front of illuminated monuments and buildings at night, sunsets over the ocean, and festive nighttime lighting.
Slow-synchro or Nighttime flash mode
This automatic mode synchronizes your flash with the very slow shutter. It may have a “stars and mountain” or “stars and person” icon. The camera opens the shutter long enough to compensate for the dim twilight lighting, capturing all of the rich, saturated colors. The flash, meanwhile, throttles down, emitting just enough light to illuminate the subject from the front.
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If you really want to impress your friends with your budding photographic skills, try capturing star trails. Surely you’ve seen these dramatic shots: one star, located in the center of the frame, remains a point of light, but all the other stars in the universe seem to carve concentric circle segments around it, as though the galaxy were spinning dizzily. (That one fixed star, in case you were wondering, is the North Star. It remains steady as all the other stars seem to travel in a circular path around it, thanks to the rotation of the earth.)
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You’ve seen this shot on postcards and in magazines: neon bands of light streaking across the frame, with a nicely lit bridge or building in the background. The trick to these shots is to keep the shutter open long enough for the cars to pass all the way from one side of the frame to the other.
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Your camera usually does a good job of exposing the sky during sunset, even in automatic mode. Keep the flash turned off and shoot at will. The biggest mistake people make when shooting sunsets has nothing to do with the skyit’s the ground that ruins the shots. Your eyes can make out much more detail in the shadowy ground than your camera will. Therefore, it’s not worth trying to split the frame in half, composing it with the sky above and the ground below. The bottom half of your photo will be just a murky black blob in the final image.
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