Digital Camera Master

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:

1. Mount your camera on a tripod. Your exposure times will be a half second or longer; there is absolutely no way you can hold the camera for that amount of time without introducing an incredible amount of blur.
2. Switch your camera to its manual exposure mode, if it has one. Set the aperture to a medium setting, such as f/5.6. Set the shutter speed to 1/2.
3. Point the camera at something interesting. If this is the first time you are trying night photography, I suggest you go to a fairly busy intersection downtown, and frame the street and a store or two in your viewfinder.
4. When a car is about to enter your viewfinder, take the picture. You should be able to get fairly instant feedback on how your picture came out by looking at it in the camera’s LCD display. No matter how good or bad the picture came out, do not delete it.
5. Now double the shutter speed. Try an exposure of one second and shoot the same scene again.
6. Take more pictures, varying the shutter speed so you can get a feel for what kind of results your camera gives at night at various shutter speeds. You will very likely find that your camera won’t expose a picture for more than a few seconds; many cameras limit the shutter speed to 5 or 10 seconds. That’s okay—just work your way up until you hit your camera’s maximum shutter speed.
7. If your camera automatically records exposure information for each picture, great. If not, write down all of your exposure information so you’ll remember what you did later and learn from your efforts.