Night time photo walk

The hardest thing to do when shooting is just get yourself out there! I've got 2 beautiful baby kids so it's been a chore to get out and shoot these past few years. Finally got my mom to watch the kids and took my wife out for a photo walk in San Francisco. Bring your tripod and look for some beautiful places to shoot. It takes about 2 hours drive to get to this location so when we got here it was about 9pm.

This was taken at the Palace of Fine arts in San Francisco. Exposure is 15 seconds, and I shoot at F8 to get the clearest picture. ISO is set to 100

Landscape Night Shooting with Your Digital Camera

Thanks to the digital camera we can now take shots and review results right on the spot. Gone are the days of trial and error of buying many rolls of film and hoping that your images came out good. Can you imagine spending $8 dollars on a roll of 32 shots of film, and then having to go to the store and get them developed for another $10-15. When we look back on that, it’s almost ridiculous. If you were shooting anything at all you’d always pray that your shots came out ok, they weren’t blurry or overexposed etc

We are so spoiled these days and I’m not complaining. Reviewing your shots right as you take them helps anyone become a good photographer. Gone are the days of writing down what focal length, exposure times etc, now you can just pop them on your computer, right click, properties and see everything about the image you took from the camera settings info.

Things just seem to come alive at night. Colors just pop out at you everywhere. The night time can be a very fun time to shoot. You might have tried it before and the results might not have been so good. There are a few tricks to doing night photography. I’ll teach you what I know from experience.

You don’t need super expensive gear to shoot like a pro at night, if you plan it right. Motion shots at night require a low aperture lens (1.4 1.8, 2.8 etc). If your shooting landscapes and non moving objects you just need a good tripod.

Tripods

Tripods come in many different sizes. I’ve bought them all from small cute handheld ones to pretty hefty ones. I’ve bought a few from Best Buy for $30, the $50, etc and they don’t seem to last long. What can happen to a tripod? Well the legs can break off. Or your camera falls over and you say I’ll never use that one again. If your going to get serious about night photography I suggest buying a decent tripod from a real camera store. Something made in Carbon Fiber so it’s lightweight. When your hobby starts to become an obsession and you start carrying around 30 pounds of gear with you a light weight tripod makes a huge difference. I feel the tripod is one of the more important things for landscape night photography. Get something that won’t fall over so easy, lightweight yet stable in the wind. Trust me you’ll find yourself in very windy places.

Camera Triggers

Camera Triggers are helpful but not required. If you don’t have one then be very careful when you push that shutter button down. Or you can set your camera to take the shot a few seconds after you hit the button. You’ll have to read the manual on how to set that up. It’s easy.

Lenses

If you plan on printing out poster sized images then you might want to buy a more expensive lens, but if your just going to put them on the web or print smaller ones like 16×20 then most lenses will work. I shot the Bay Bridge here with a $75 canon lens. I was even shooting other subjects with the really cheap kit lens from my Canon 20D and getting nice results. The key is to use a tripod so nothing comes out blurry.

 

Taking The Shot

I’m going to tell you to do the opposite of everything you ever learned for doing night photography. Don’t worry. Lets find a place to shoot. Treasure Island is beautiful at night. This was taken at about 7PM in January. When shooting night photography landscapes it’s nice to have everything in focus.

How do yo do that? We are going to use manual mode. Set your aperture up to F8, this will make it so everything in your shot is in focus. Your probably thinking won’t everything be really dark? Yes. Now set your ISO to 100. If you bump up the ISO like you normally would do then your shot is going to be really fuzzy and grainy. We want a nice clean shot so set your ISO as low as possible. Now set your camera to do a 5 second exposure. Not 5, but 5 seconds!

Shoot and review. If your shot is too dark, set it for 10, then 15, 20, 25, 30, and even try 1 minute or longer if you like. It’s digital and you can delete on the spot.

My bay bridge picture here is shot at the following:

50mm, ISO 100, F8, 30 second exposure.

There is no photoshop here. This picture is straight from the camera.

The Golden Gate was shot as follows:

33mm, ISO 100, F4.5, 5 second exposure.

Using Your 50MM 1.4 Aperature

Shooting with the low aperature can get kind of tricky when the aperature is very low like 1.4. The lens can be very clear in just a small portion of the picture. Pictured here shot using the 50mm 1.4. The only photoshop here is cropping the top half and editing of the face a little bit. Other than that there is no photoshop on blurring the photo. That is all lens right there.

 

As you can see the wall is almost totally out of focus, then as it gets close to her it gets into focus very quickly. Tram is fully in focus and then the background is blurred again.

You can see how small of an area you have in focus in the next picture by being close to the subject.

 

The next shot shows a bad use of the 50mm. The picture starts out nice but the depth of field is just too low and Tram’s face starts to get blurry to fast.

The right side of the wall is in focus. By the time you get to the left side of her face it’s starting to blur.

How can you fix this problem? You can either step back a bit adjust the focusing to the left a little and get the arm blurry and the face more clear.

 

Here are a few more examples of using the 50mm @ 1.4 aperature.

 

How To Capture Motion with your Digital SLR

Article and Car Pictures by Ryan C. Smith

To be a top notch photographer you have to get creative. Forget about using photoshop, try to use your camera so you don’t have to spend time at home post processing. I hear it all the time, we’ll just fix this in post. For me that’s not an option. You’ve spent a hefty investment on your camera so it can do the things you want it to do. Try different things with it and see what kind of effects you can achieve.

For this article, I will show you how to capture motion in objects we see everyday. How about cars. They drive past us everyday. You can go out on your front lawn and practice taking pictures of cars as they go by. It’s free and you can just delete the bad pictures.

Drift Car with no motion - F10, ISO 400, 1/1250 sec

As you can see the car looks like it’s still. It could be parked. The wheels show no motion at all or very little.

 

As you can see in the picture above there really isn’t too much motion. The camera was probably on sports mode which will use a very fast shutter frame to freeze the motion of something fast.

Drift Cars showing Motion - F5, ISO 400, 1/50th Sec

Now you can see there is motion in this picture. The background is a bit blurred, the wheels are blurred, it makes the picture look alive. We achieve this effect by using a slow shutter speed. The shutter opens and closes much more slowly than when it’s in sports mode.

It’s hard to imagine because it happens so fast. Your camera lets light onto the sensor for a specific amount of time. 1/2000 means that shutter opens and closes in 2000th of a 2nd. 1/60th means it opens and closes in a 60th of a second. You can imagine if your running full speed, the time it takes to jump 2 inches, or 6 inches. Not much time at all. 2 inches is much shorter than 6 inches though.

Panning

In the photography world there is something called panning. It’s where if an object is going by you, you set your camera on burst mode. The mode where it will continuously take pictures. Like my Canon 7D does 7 frames per second. When the car is driving by you focus on it while it’s a bit far away and then start shooting. As you shoot move your camera the same speed as the car is driving by. This is called panning.

Slow Shutter Speed

To Grab that motion start with a slow shutter speed of like 1/120th of a second. Then pan as the car comes your way. It takes practice but once you get it down you’ll be able to make cars look like space ships. Don’t worry about getting blurry pictures because everyone gets them and these are called “throw away’s”. Start at 1/120th of a second and then as you get better work your way down. As you practice more it things get easier.

Monopod

I’ve found that the best tool to help panning pictures is to use a monopod. A monopod helps add stability to your camera and allows for the most flexibility when panning. I use a Rocketfish Tripod from Best Buy. It’s a little pricey at $99 but I found it to be one of the best ones I’ve used.

The End Results

Here are some pictures I took with my Mono-pod with cars driving down the street. With my Monopod I was able to get down to 1/20th of a second which is insanely slow.

Showing the Motion - F22, ISO 400, 1/20th sec

Showing the Motion - F22, ISO 400, 1/20th sec

Showing the Motion - F22, ISO 400, 1/20th sec