How to take nighttime photographs

Taking photographs at night can be very difficult if you don't have sufficient lighting, or your trying to take some overall photos of large areas. Here are some tips to help you take some amazing night photos.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Digital camera (you can use a manual, but digital is much easier)
• tripod
• Shutter release

1. Figure out what you'd like to take a photograph of. Out door night time photos can end up looking great if you pick the right area. You wouldn't have to use this technique indoor unless you didn't have any indoor lighting or a flash for your camera.

2. Find an area that has almost no ambient lighting. Try to stay away from lights or signs that will overexpose your photo. The best photos you can take would be up in the mountains or somewhere remote away from city lights.

3. Set up your tripod and connect your camera to it. If you have a shutter release connect this as well. The shutter release makes it so that you don't have to touch your actual camera while photographing. When your leaving your shutter open for more than a split second even barely touching the camera to push the shutter button can cause enough movement to make your picture shaky.

4. 
    

   Set your digital camera to it's "bulb" setting. You can either use your automatic setting that will figure out how long to keep your shutter open, or you can do it entirely manually and try different lengths of time yourself to see how they turn out. Check your cameras manual to find out how to set up a "timed" exposure. Take a couple of different photos to see what turns out best.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure your tripod is on a very stable surface and that you avoid any traffic lights or other ambient lights. This method also works really well to take photos of lightning strikes (just make sure you keep your camera covered to keep it from getting rained on). Any movement going through your photo will most likely show up as a blur (like a car driving past). Although you can run through your photo, and as long as you don't stop, you most likely won't show up in it. You can do this holding a light or glow stick, a method called "painting with light".
• Your photos may turn out a bit discolored as they will be exposed for a very long time. Some cheaper digital cameras may show small blue dots on the photo when you used a timed exposure. Usually putting them on photoshop and running a few filters through will get rid of this.

[CakesGalore]

on 8/27/2008 Now maybe I can get my pics to turn out.

[arianacherry99]

on 8/15/2008 Thanks for the tips. I seem to always have problems taking pictures at night. This is a useful article.

[alienangel555]

on 7/25/2008 Cool. 5 stars