Night Time Photography

We all want to be able to take good night time pictures wether it's of a sleeping child or some celebration.  Night time photography can be tricky because you have to do things that you normally don't do, and you have to mess with settings in a way you don't mess with during the day.

Depending on what you are photographing depends on how you are going to set up your camera, but regardless of what you are photographing you NEED to use a tripod or have your camera sitting on something.

Because shutter speed settings have to be so much lower than normal, you will have blurry pictures if you do not use something to hold your camera.  We are constantly moving no matter how still we think we are.  Every time you take a breath, you move your camera.  Now in most cases this is not an issue, but when we are dealing with shutter speeds that are less than 1/100 that tiny bit of movement is enough to make your picture blurry and out of focus.  Steady your camera if you want to be successful!

I am going to focus this post on taking night time pictures of light movement/fireworks/ect. If you are looking for a tutorial on how to take night or dark pictures of your children (such as when they are sleeping) I will eventually get around to posting one, but in the mean time you can check out Click It Up a Notch.  She has one posted that's very helpful.

A few months ago, we went to Disneyland Paris.  They have a magnificent light show at Aurora's castle.  Thankfully I had my tripod with me (I was also using it to get some family shots while we were there).  I set my camera on the tripod and got ready to snap away!

The first thing I did was to get my settings.  I knew that I wanted a wide range of focus area, so I didn't open my aperture all of the way (which is generally preferred in darker settings since it lets in more light).  Once I had the depth of field that I wanted, now was the time to play with my ISO and shutter speed.  This is where you might have to get out of your comfort zone a bit because most dark lighting/night pictures require a high ISO.  In other cases you want to keep the ISO levels low, but not this time.   Now if you are trying to catch some movement in the photo then you can still keep your ISO level lower.

For this picture I was using my tripod, and since I was testing lighting, I used a lower shutter speed so I didn't have to crank my ISO up to much.  For those of you who have read some of my other posts, I have talked about how a higher ISO setting will start causing grain.  This image didn't have any movement in it, so I was able to keep my shutter lower and not have any blurriness.

 My Settings:  f/5, 1/5 shutter, ISO 500, 18-55mm

For this picture I wanted to get some movement of the fireworks.  My main focus in all of these was the castle, so I kept my shutter at 1/5.  You'll notice that my castle is still pretty crisp, and you can see movement of the fireworks as they were going off.

My Settings: f/5, 1/5 shutter, ISO 640, 18-55mm 

This last picture I'm going to share is similar to the one above.  I was trying to photograph the gorgeous light show!  It was amazing to see, and I only wish these pictures could show how truly magnificent the show was!  Because the castle was the main part of the show that was my reason for focusing on it.  

My Settings:  f/5, 1/5 Shutter, ISO 640, 18-55mm

Every situation will call for a different setting.  These are just the ones I chose.  Because I set everything up before the show started I chose my settings to make the castle the focal point and to be in focus.  To be honest I could have used a higher shutter speed and a higher ISO setting to make the movement of the show a little more in focus.