Digital Night Photography Tips
Picture Taking Tips for the Best Night Pictures

These digital night photography tips will help you get great night pictures every time. Night photography isn't as hard to master as you might think. You can get some great images of people and buildings once the sun goes down. All you need is the right digital photography techniques to get killer pictures.

Your Camera's Night Setting

Most cameras have a night setting. You can play with this setting to see if it's appropriate for your purposes. I don't like the night setting on my camera and tend to have more luck setting my camera manually. The night setting on your camera is determined by the manufacturer and doesn't allow for adjustment. This means that there's a very specific situation that it's right for. If you're not in that specific situation you won't get the results you want.

If you're familiar with some basic picture taking tips, you won't need to use the night setting. Manual settings on your camera will help you have more control and get a better image.

ISO

When you're taking pictures at night there isn't a lot of light to use to make the picture. To make up for the lack of light you need to set up your camera manually to take advantage of the small amount of light available. The first setting you may want to try to adjust is the ISO.

The ISO setting determines how sensitive your camera's sensor is to light. The higher the ISO the more sensitive it is. If your camera is set to ISO 100 the sensor will be less sensitive to light than if it were set to ISO 400.

Most people assume that in order to take pictures at night you need to set your camera's ISO high, but that isn't necessarily the case. The higher your ISO setting the more visual distortion or noise will appear in the picture. If you can you should try to keep your ISO relatively low and concentrate on using shutter speed to get a good amount of light into the camera.

Shutter Speed

With your camera set at a low ISO setting you need to have your shutter open for a longer time in order to get the right amount of light on the sensor to make a good exposure. There is no set shutter speed that I can tell you to use when taking pictures at night. It all depends on different variables when you're photographing, like your aperture, your ISO setting, and the amount of light in the scene.

Keep in mind that if your are taking pictures of a stationary object like a building at night like a building you can use a low ISO setting with a slow shutter speed to get a crisp high quality night picture. If you're taking pictures of moving objects like people or cars and you don't want motion blur to be part of your final image you should use a higher ISO and a shorter shutter speed to freeze the motion.

Tripod

The problem with using a slow shutter speed is that moving your camera at all while the shutter is open will blur the image. I recommend that you use a tripod when taking pictures at night. The tripod will allow your camera to stay perfectly still while you take the picture.

Remote

If you have a remote shutter release for your camera use it when you take night pictures. This digital photography technique will help you keep your camera as still as possible. When you touch the shutter button on your camera to take a picture some movement occurs. To prevent movement you want to avoid touching the camera.

If you don't have a remote shutter release you can you the cameras timer to take a picture. Even your most basic point and shoot cameras have a timer mechanism for taking pictures.

When to Take Night Pictures

Digital night photography is often best if done just after sunset or just before sunrise. At these times, the sky still has a little light and is a right dark blue. This time of night is sometimes referred to as the Blue Hour. A completely dark sky will make for too much contrast in your picture.

Now that you know the basics you can start taking some amazing digital night photography.

If these digital night photography tips have helped you check out some of our other digital photography tutorials.