How Do I Take Better Night Scenes?
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?
Photography is all about brightness levels. In a photograph you have to capture a range of light from dark to light. In ‘average’ lighting conditions – the light levels from the darkest black to the whitest white should fall well within what the camera can handle in one exposure. When shooting night scenes, however, the levels of light are often far beyond the sensitivity range of the camera. Within the frame we may have a pitch-black sky at the bottom end of the scale, and a cluster of very bright street lights shining directly into the lens at the top end of the scale. Even the human eye will find it difficult to adjust to such a wide range of light levels. In a photograph, we get the ‘bleached out’ effect.
So what’s the solution? First, it’s generally better to shoot while there’s still some light in the sky. Not only does it look better than a black sky, but dusk light lifts the level of ambient light, ‘topping up’ the artificial lights, so you’re not reliant on them alone.
The other thing you have to avoid is artificial light shining directly into the lens – move away from lights and try to hide them behind lampposts or other obstacles. You’ll also need to use a lens hood or hold your hand over the lens to block stray light rays coming in from the side.
The final thing you need to do is set the autoexposure compensation to minus one or two. Looking in the LCD you can experiment with different levels of underexposure. You can even merge these multiple shots later, combining the optimallyexposed parts of a range of shots.
