Even if you are just beginning to learn about photography you will be aware of the special requirements for capturing subjects that are in the dark or with very low light available. Most people are aware of this when they first purchase a point and shoot camera for everyday use.

Evening cityscapes with the glimmer of thousands of lights require special settings and planning before a successful image can be captured. There are also special methods needed to capture celestial objects like the moon or the stars, and a modern digital camera is the ideal tool for night time photography.

The basic requirement of a digital camera for night time photography is to have:

• A Fully Manual mode (Many automatic settings are too fast to take a proper photo of the night sky)
• Self-Timer (This removes your “hand shake” and prevents blur)
• Tripod (Will help you to take repeat images without blur)

Taking a Few Practice Shots

With a digital camera on full manual mode all of the settings required for ideal photos can be adjusted to allow for exterior lighting or brightness. A digital camera also allows for experimentation and many “retakes” if necessary. Take a few images with the slowest shutter speeds and the aperture fully open, this may allow in too much light, but you will be able to review your photos and make adjustments as necessary. Then it is just a matter of adjusting the shutter speed and/or aperture to get the picture you desire.

Shooting the Paths of the Stars

A fun project in night time photography is to leave the shutter open for greatly extended periods of times, for minutes or tens of minutes, to trace the paths of the stars overhead. This is best achieved by composing the picture to have a focal point, such as a tree or horizon line to heighten the drama in the traveling stars above. A great idea is to put the camera, on its tripod, on the ground with trees and grass surrounding.

Shooting the Moon

Another method of night time photography involves photographing the moon, which is a great deal trickier than it sounds. The moon is best photographed when there is a comparative object, such as a cityscape or tall building nearest to it in the image. The same manual adjustments and tripod usage will have to occur when photographing the moon as when photographing stars in the night sky. Next a process called “bracketing” (or simply experimentation) will be employed to determine the best settings for a good image. The manual focus is set at infinity then the exposure level is determined by using each shutter speed through the 1/1000 setting, while the aperture or f-stop is at 5.6. Film or ISO speed of 200 is recommended for moon photography. Keep checking results on the LCD and soon a perfect image of the moon will be recorded on the camera!

Happy Shooting,
Amy Renfrey

Photoshop allows some essential and basic photographic editing to be done, but even just the most basic processes can greatly enhance images for both amateur and professional photographers. Photoshop is also known for its creative capabilities as well as its aesthetic corrective tools.

Eliminate the Ever Devastating Red Eye

Many group, holiday or special events photographs are ruined by the occurrence of a photographic phenomenon known as “red eye,” which is simply light reflecting back from the wide-open pupil of the subject(s). Some digital cameras have a flash setting meant to conquer red-eye occurrences, but they are not always a guarantee against it. Photoshop has a red-eye tool to identify, diminish or completely eliminate the appearance of red eye in an image. With Photoshop, you can remove all red eyes, even those of your cat or dog.

Create Clearer and Brighter Photos

Another Photoshop tool meant to help clean up an image or improve its appearance is the suite of color enhancing tools that will increase or decrease contrast and hue and brightness. This allows a photographer to manually adjust an image’s color settings to give it the sharpest and cleanest appearance possible, even when you’re starting out with an all too dark image.

Who is that Person in the Background? Crop them Out!

Photoshop also has several tools for cropping an image, or cutting elements out of a picture all together. The cropping feature allows for an image to be resized and enhanced, meaning that a group image taken from too far a distance and with too great of an allowance of background can be cropped down to fill the frame and refocused to be clear and sharp at the new focused setting. Or, if there’s someone in the photo you don’t know or aren’t fond of, you can simply cut them out.

Get Artistic

For more artful experiments, Photoshop allows color images to be altered to black and white or even altered to a whole variety of hues and colors. There are a tremendous numbers of palettes, tools and filters to apply to images to great effect. A color photograph can be cropped or resized, have all of the colors reversed and the hues changed, or filters applied to make the image appear to be textured or created from another medium such as a painting. The experimentation possible with the software program is almost limitless. As both an image repair program and an artist’s tool, Photoshop is a good place to explore photography and photographic enhancement.

Amy Renfrey

In your landscape photography you will find that the majority is probably with a tripod. But each type of photography uses different tools. Photographers that do sports photography like to use a hand-held strategy so they can get the shot quickly. The last thing they want is to be fiddling with a tripod when they could be shooting the football player who has just won the goal for their team. Instead, they ‘ll choose a monopod which has greater flexibility and gives them greater access to the series of shots they want.

Tripods are brilliant for nature and landscape shots. But sometimes they are bulky and cumbersome. When you are shooting your landscapes it can be a pain in the backside lugging the tripod up a mountain or a steep hill just to get to the top to get that perfect shot when the sun is just right. But as painful as this is, when you look at your photos afterward, you’ll most likely say “wow, it was worth it.”

One of the great things about tripods is that they allow you to capture that beautifully, gentle light you see during a sunset, just before twilight. Twilight has a sweet light, and just before that there are some pretty fantastic photographic opportunities.

You’ll no doubt find that as dusk blankets the land the more photos you take the more blur you get. There’s no other time of day that feels like light changes than dusk. It feels like light is just slipping through your fingers like sand through an hour glass. And its during this time that you need to keep that camera rock-steady.

If you are in the unfortunate situation of not having a tripod st this magical time you can always boost your ISO from the mid range 400 to a higher 800. This will increase the light sensitivity quite a lot. You’ll find more noise that way but you can always fix this in Noise Ninja or other photographic post editing software.

A tripod is not only good for dusk and for very low light situations such as getting crystal clear night shots. Anytime you want to slow down your shutter speed a tripod becomes the necessity.

Photo Copyright By Roma Flowers. 

Fireworks are short lived, explosions of colour which have an intensity lasting for just a few seconds. Taking pictures of fireworks involves a little bit of planning, not just point and shoot and hope for the best. Getting good digital shots of fireworks is about using your settings properly to expose the picture without getting too much noise in the picture. 

Select your shooting location. Fireworks look fabulous if you fill the frame but try not to cut off their edges. They need the depth in a shot, so make sure the composition is in keeping the appearance of being ‘big.’ After all, you want to convey their majesty and power in the photo. But be careful- with camera shake, fireworks look like wriggling electric snakes instead!

Charging the camera

Being outdoors and taking lots of photos with exposures to suit eats up a lot of power in your charge. So make sure the camera is fully charged before even venturing outside. There is nothing worse than the camera running out of power at the crucial moment or the thing blinking at you, saying you have one shot left and you haven’t finished!

Take the biggest size capacity memory card or memory stick (if it’s a Sony) because believe me, you’ll need it. Once captivated and determined to get a really good picture, you’ll be there for as long as it takes snapping away and will most likely loose track of time. (If you’re anything like me, people will expect you to have a camera.)

On the camera you will be able to set it at the highest resolution image. The picture will be compressed when you get it onto the computer and email it anyway, so chose the highest resolution so the image does not loose clarity and so that even some of the noise from the night sky will be compressed.

Where to focus

It’s hard to know what to focus on with fireworks. It’s not until they are in the sky that you can really tell where to focus, what to focus on, how to set the camera, and you can’t do all that in a few seconds. But what you can do is focus on the maximum range of focal distance. Perhaps even pick something in the distance that you think might be the same distance away as the fireworks would be, and set the camera to that. If you choose auto focus you’ll find your shot will be gone as the fireworks evaporate into the blackness of the night sky.

When taking pictures of fireworks with your tripod, one trick to use is to keep the shutter button down for the entire time the fireworks have exploded in their array of colour. The moment they show signs of fading, release your finger and let the camera close the shutter. What you are doing here is keeping the ‘eye’ of the camera open long enough for the light and colour to get into the lens, senor and create a grand image for you.

The right exposure time for fireworks

The best time is a long time! But not too long: I recommend holding the shutter button down, or release the cable after about one and a half seconds up to five seconds. The longer that this happens, the longer the burst you will have on your sensor. Longer exposure times do indeed compensate for the lack of light, but the only draw back with digital is that the longer the aperture stays open, the more noise creeps into the photo.

If your camera is an SLR or has some good manual controls then you can choose how you want the fireworks to come out. A smaller aperture (f.5.6, f. creates thin streaky lines and a wider aperture creates chunky lines. Whatever effect you want, make sure you have control over the exposure, not the other way around.  Make sure which ever way you go, (thin streaky=smaller aperture; wide, chunky= larger aperture) experiment and have fun and you’ll get to know which fireworks you like. If you’re not sure, try both types of exposure and a something in between and see what you like best.

Composition

Want your fireworks pictures to be really good? Now that I’ve given you something to think about with your exposure why not try altering your angle? Remember how I spoke about composition? Well night time is the right time too!

Select your location. Make sure it’s a good clear shot without street lights getting into the camera to detract from the beautiful images on your photo, or passing cars that may potentially create light streaks in your picture. Also choose a spot where people won’t constantly walk in front of the camera, stare at it and wave whilst you are trying to take the picture (pet hate). Minimize any risks to yourself or anybody else.

Trails beautiful trails…..

So how do we capture those gorgeous trails left by a fireworks explosion? Try moving your camera at a different angle, like tilting it. This can enhance the creativity of your angle and shots by simply using a different movement on your camera. If you are using a tripod then make sure it angles with you. You shouldn’t have to take the camera off the tripod to get lots of good shots. Angle it so that the shot is 90 degrees vertical, and even whereby the bottom of the picture is at an angle.

Double exposure and layering

Double exposure is a pretty neat trick. Sometimes professional photographers use this. It’s cheating a little, but it does create some amazing photos.

Take two pictures in the same location of the fireworks exploding. Then in PhotoShop layer one on top of the other. The result looks pretty amazing. It looks as if two lots of fireworks are merging together in the sky. Open both pictures in PhotoShop; select a rectangle or freeform part on the sky of the second photo, copy that as a layer on top of the first photo, then merge the results. This is layering.

Some photographs require astonishing skill; others require being in the exact right place at the exact right time. The ones below needed both.

Take a moment from your day to appreciate the immense beauty that surrounds us, and enjoy these astounding photos!

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/10/13/how-were-these-amazing-photographs-even-possible.aspx

Merry Christmas everyone!

The year is coming to a close and so is work and hopefully we can all wind down and relax for a few weeks. Its also a great time to grab those cameras and take some sensational photos of Christmas lights. When I say Christmas lights I mean anything from the Christmas tree to peoples houses decorated in pretty lights to Christmas candles.

We live in a neighbourhood where people love to decorate their houses with all sorts of lights, reindeer’s, Santa’s sleigh, angels and religious themes. Its such a fun and special times of year for those of you who are just big kids.

And photographically its a fantastic time as well, because those lights look absolutely beautiful; in a photo. Lets take this one for example:

Photo by Gavin Mills

This photo would have been taken using a tripod and a very slow shutter speed. When I take photos of Christmas lights I use a tripod (yes even for indoors) and use a shutter between 1/60 and 5 seconds depending on how much light you have coming from the tree itself. I recommend using a slow shutter of no more that this. By using a slow shutter you’ll be slowing the camera down so the lights are sharp and not blurry.

You can use an aperture of around f.8 or f.4/ F.4 is probably better considering you’ll always be shooting at night. These are just my recommendations, I urge you to try it yourself.

You can use a higher ISO if you find you are having trouble with getting more light onto the sensor. Sometimes I’ve used an ISO of 800 to increase the cameras light sensitivity. This can increase noise somewhat but you can use Noise Ninja to tone down any noise if you feel its too much. It will help clean up the noise in your image, leaving you with a sharper image.

For Christmas lights outdoors you can use the same types of settings. Remember also that dusk will be considered as darkness by your camera, so don’t be surprised if you end up shooting as you would at night time.

Happy shooting,

Amy Renfrey

Photo by Erin Marie Payne.

Thank you to Erin and Gavin for use of their pictures.