Night Photography Lighting Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hello, this is Mark Bowers from Bower's Photography.com in Utah. And we're talking about night time photography. What I like to use is, sometimes the ambient light around at night time. But it makes for very, very long exposures. So you set your camera setting on, on B, for the time, which means your lens is open, and anything that's in front of your lens is being exposed. The other thing we use is flash. Many times I'll be doing a wedding, and I need to put a flash on the camera just to....to get 'em a little bit more light, because things are moving pretty fast. Also, another thing that I try to do is photograph the moon, which, from here, it's actually sunlight shining on the moon, so your exposure is about normal for a sunny day on earth. So, you're not photographing the night sky. You're photographing a sun-lit, astronomical body. You have to keep that in mind when you're photographing the moon. Another technique that I've seen that's kind of interesting is, you put your camera on a tripod, and if you want to photograph fireworks, usually you try your camera at about F8, just to try it. And put it on a tripod, and put your setting on bulb, and point it towards where the fireworks are. Make sure the focus is on manual, so that you're manually focused. The auto focus won't work on that. And just let a few fireworks go, and that's really fun, it makes some beautiful. Also cars whizzing by on the street, you can do the same thing. Set your camera on a tripod and let the cars whiz by. It makes some really interesting light streaks across there. Another technique that I'd like to show you is using a little spotlight. And...and turn it on in a dark studio, or a dark room. And painting with light. You set your camera on bulb setting, and whatever your subject is here, you run the light around...around what you're trying to photograph. And it creates a very interesting, beautiful light on the object that you're photographing."