How to Shoot Night Photography

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Kight with AS Photography and we are going to talk about shooting at night. Now there are several different ways to shoot at night. The easiest of course is to have a flash. The flash will illuminate the foreground; anything that's pass a certain point; it's going to have a hard time illuminating and so you won't get as many options and the images will have kind of a stark look because it is flashed. And if you wanted to go something else; if you wanted to shoot without a flash at night, you can do it. You need to have; if shooting with film you need to have a very fast film. It's going to end up being very grainy in the long run because faster film has lot of grain in it. But you can get it done, you just have to shoot; make sure that your lens would have a, it's a very fast lens and fast film. Now fast lens; for example this guy right here; this is an 80 to 200 and it's a 2.8; 2.8 is pretty fast. But this one on here is not the fastest lens you can get of course, but this one is a fixed 50mm lens and it's 1.8. So 1.8 is smaller than 2.8 which makes it a faster lens, which makes the aperture wider at it's widest points; so more light gets in. So the more light you get in, the fast the film, the more chance you're going to get to capture something at night. So, then after you have your film setting and you have everything done, you could actually; on a digital camera, you can change your ISO settings from, like this one set at 200 now, I'm going to roll it up to, the highest one we have is 1600 and then they have a H ; it's a plus one, it's just a couple of settings over the fastest setting which will, in digital film as well give you more of a grain look but it will give you a better chance at catching an image at night. Then what you can do, if you would like, is you can change your shutter speed and your shutter speed you can set to, let's say, you have a tripod and you want to shoot the stars. If you've seen pictures where it looks like where the stars are streaking across the sky, set your tripod up, point your camera in the sky, get it in focus, put it on manual focus; then set your shutter to fire at a; some cameras have a setting called bulb; others you can actually set a timer on it so that it will shoot, the, the aperture will actually stay open for, the shutter will stay open for a fixed amount of time, thirty seconds to a minute, two minutes, seven minutes, something like that. Some of the, the Photographer Brassai, a French photographer was famous for doing; he would smoke a cigarette and that's how he knew how long he need to leave a shutter up. And he'd light; he'd open up the lens; he'd light up a cigarette and he'd smoke and then he timed it out, there was about seven minutes long and when that was done he needed to shut his lens and that was, that would give him pictures like fog across with headlights going through, something like that; that's how he would get those brilliant images at night without using a flash. So when you're shooting or when you're choosing to shoot something that happens at night, you need to decide if you want to have that stark look of a flash; if you want to have a look where you have the opportunity for your subject to stay still because if you have your shutter open for a long time and your subject, subject moves, then that isn't going to be an option for you. But if your subject doesn't going to move and you have the opportunity to leave it up for awhile, you can choose to do it that way or high speed film and a fast lens will get you the, the ability to shoot at night as well."