Night-time Photography
Once the sun has gone down, for most photographers it’s time to pack up their photographic gear and head for home. But others make sure that they have their tripod, remote release and flash equipment and search for interesting night-time subjects. Although total darkness can be challenging, it can also provide an opportunity for creative imaging. Using a programme that allows a flash to fire to light the foreground, followed by an open aperture to correctly expose and capture the dark background, it’s amazing what lighting effects that can be achieved. But using existing light can also provide excellent results and interesting photographs. Try various settings of the white balance on your digital camera to change the light colour temperature. If you have a single lens reflex camera (SLR) with a bulb mode allowing you to leave the shutter open for a long time, you can get some incredible pictures of a star-studded sky enhanced with various trails of light. Point-and-shoot cameras are not really suitable for this type of photography as manual control is required over aperture size, shutter speed and flash systems. Using a film camera, the results of night-time photography were unknown until the film had been developed and were often unexpected and sometimes disappointing. However, the advent of digital photography has provided far fewer surprises, far more control and increased the success rate.