Photographing in Limited Light

Video Transcript

"When taking photographs, you'll often run into limited light situations and other special situations where you really have to use the tools that you have and the knowledge that you have about your camera to make certain determinations that's going to allow you to take the best photograph. Example I have is I was on a trip in Egypt. You get to tour a lot of temples, which is a really neat part of Egypt. One problem is they're not lit very well, and also for deterioration, they don't like you to use your flash in there. So you have to think, how am I going to get a strong shot with this limited light? Obviously, you want to hold the camera very still because you're going to be using a slower shutter speed to allow more light into the image. So in a limited light situation, a tripod is going to be very helpful. As you can see, over my shoulder, I have my tripod. A real photographer is really not going to go anywhere without a tripod. I've been told by people from National Geographic that they can look at any image and tell you whether a tripod was used or not. So when you're in these low light and special situations, sometimes you're going to be able to use a flash, sometimes you're going to be able to use a strobe. Other times you're just going to have to use what's around you and stop down your camera or use a very slow shutter speed. Again, in this image, I was lucky because it's a static image. Nothing moving in this image, so I was able to bring the shutter speed down slow enough that enough light could get in. But again, it was very important to have a tripod at that moment, because if the camera was to move at all while the shutter was still open you'd get a very blurry image, and not a crisp image. You don't get to got to Egypt every day, so you need to make your images come out right the first time."