Low-Light Photography

With a few changes to your photographic approach, you can produce excellent photos regardless of the lighting conditions.

Take advantage of soft, ambient lighting. Look around for natural night lighting — streetlights, the moon and stars, or a lamp’s soft glow. When you can find the perfect ambient night lighting, don’t use flash unless since this will ruin the effect.

Find dramatic subjects. Because buildings, gates, and bridges are usually well lit, they offer some great opportunities to shoot without a flash.

Use reflections. Always look for water where there are lights. Water, with its inherent reflectivity, gives you a double chance to show off the beauty of the night.

Helping your camera cut through the darkness
When taking pictures in dim lighting, you can help your digital camera cut through the darkness in the following ways:

Raise the ISO setting. However, this solution sacrifices some image quality.

Increase the aperture size (by selecting a lower f-stop number) to allow more light into the camera. This choice also changes depth of field.

Select a slower shutter speed, which increases the amount of time that the image sensor can gather light.

If you are working in autoexposure mode, you may also be able to tweak exposure by increasing your camera’s EV (exposure value) compensation setting, if available.

Adjusting Light Sensitivity
To be able to exploit wider aperture settings when shooting at night, set your digital camera to a high ISO setting. This enables you to take night pictures without using your flash, which means you get more of the natural light from the surroundings in your picture.

However, as you move up the ISO scale, you increase noise, giving the image a speckled look. This is typically most apparent in shadows and areas of flat colour. How much image quality you should sacrifice for increased light sensitivity is purely a personal choice.

Shooting Long Exposures
The longer your camera allows you to keep the shutter open, the darker the scene that you can photograph successfully. If you want a clear shot, set your camera on either a tripod or a steady surface and take your shot via the camera’s self-timer so that you don’t shake the camera when pushing the shutter-release button.

Using Slow-Sync Flash
With regular flash, the background appears dark, and foreground lighting may be harsh. Slow-sync flash enables you to use your flash at slower than normal shutter speeds, letting ambient light play a bigger role in the exposure. This results in softer, more even lighting throughout the scene. Because of the slower shutter speed, always put the camera on a tripod or other steady surface to avoid blurring when using slow-sync flash mode.