How to shoot night photos

Hello people,

Today I will show you how to take great night photos with your camera.

Enjoy.

At the summer of last year I was on Zlatibor with my family. Zlatibor iz the beautiful mountain about 230 km form Belgrade. We were in our house near the city. Zlatibor in translation means gold pine.

I took my Canon 1Ds Mark II, 5D Mark III and 15mm Fisheye lens with me with the intention of making some night photos. I was hoping it wouldn't be cloudy so I could see the stars clearly.

Canon 5D Mk3, 15mm F2.8, Shutter speed 15s ISO 1600

This is you need if you want to capture night photos:

1. Camera- You can capture geat night photo with pretty much any camera these days, but it's preferably that you have dslr or a bit newer point shoot camera.

2. Lens- you need lens with as small as possible F number and as wide as posible (18-55 kit lens should work just fine but if you can find something wider it would be nice).

3. Good location- ideal location is somewhere far from city and with no light nearby.

4. Good weather- always check for weather forecast, you want clear sky and with no moon.

5. Steady tripod- this is very important because you will use long expositures and you don't want any shake in your photos.

6. Blanket and a cup od coffee- it's not necessary, but it is desirable :).

Canon 1Ds Mk2, 15mm F2.8, Shutter speed 30s ISO 2000

Here is what you need to do:

1. EXPOSURE
Set manual mode on your camera (M mode), than set the shutter speed to 30 seconds or as high as you camera supports. It's very important that your shutter speed be as long as posible because you don't have lot of light in mountain at 1 a.m. If your stars are litle bit blury you need to put shutter speed to 10-15 seconds.

This is example of 30 seconds exposure ( open image to see blurry stars)

2. FOCUS
It's very important to set your focus to infinite otherwise you will end with lots of out of focus images. You can set focus to infinite in two ways:
-Focusing on some that is far away and put switch from AF to MF ( I prefer to put a little bit of tape on focusing ring)
-If your lens has focusing window you can manualy set focus to infinite.

This will happen if you don't set focus right

3. RAW
Shoot RAW because night photos requires lot of editing.

4.WHITE BALANCE
You can set WB to auto it isn't that important because you shoot RAW anyway.

5. ISO SPEED
Set iso speed to 1600 and check the photo if the picture is to dark increase iso to 3200 or 6400 but keep in mind if you increse iso that will increase noise in photography ( you can turn on noise reduction in camera seting).

6. STEADY SHOOT
Use the more stable tripod you can find. If you lens or camera has optical stabilization (IS, OS, VR or whatever it's called on your lens :) ). If it's windy outside make sure thats your cameras strip is atached strong to tripod. if your camera have 2 second delay turn that function on and use canon intervalometer if you have one.

7. COMPOSITION
Composition is one of the most important aspects of night photography and photography in general. If you think that your photos are boring you can add some object or someone in the midle of the frame ( look at the first photo). Rimember if you have everything right but your composition is bad, photo will be bad.

8. EDIT PHOTOS IN LR AND PS
It's very important to edit photos because that way you extract full beauty from your photos.
( If you want editing post please upvote and comment post).

Canon 1Ds Mk2, 15mm F2.8, Shutter speed 20s ISO 1600

I hope that you like this post, please support me with upvote and comment.
Thanks you for reading.
Enjoy.