After dark you will find many shops completely blacked out but those which are lit or partially lit offer unique opportunities to photograph empty places.
Without people around to question what you are doing you can spend the time you need to do to find great subjects to capture. Look for different colours of light and repeated objects – here the local laundromat provides a moody subject which is only enhanced by the grain from the high ISO setting used.
Labels: closed shops, Helen Bradley, night, Photography, photography how to, tips
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In busy cities and even in country towns you will find that the activity at night differs from that during the day.
Tankers deliver fuel, people clean areas that aren’t cleaned during the day and they are all great subjects to shoot.
Take the time to search out unusual activities to capture them. Here a cleaner was throwing up a cloud of steam and water and, captured in the night lights of the shops it made for an interesting shot.
Labels: Helen Bradley, lowlight phototgraphy, night, night activity, Photography, photography how to, tips
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If you’re shooting after sundown or if you are up early in the morning before the sun is up look for drop dead gorgeous skies.
If you can capture the last rays of a dying sun or the first rays in the early morning you’ll get great color and wonderful silhouetting of anything between you and what light there is. Look for interesting trees, buildings and other features to capture as silhouettes.
Use a slow shutter speed, wide aperture or a high ISO (or all three) and be ready to capture the hues as they change from minute to minute across the horizon.
Labels: early morning sun, Helen Bradley, lowlight phototgraphy, Photography, photography how to, shot at night, tips
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When you’re capturing shots with a slow shutter speed of a half a second or more, look out for things that are moving in an interesting way to capture them.
The tail lights of cars moving away from you look great when they are caught as parallel strips of red light.
You can get a similar effect with cars and other traffic which moves perpendicular to you – in this case you will catch both the light from headlights and tail lights as they move across your path.
Labels: capture movement, interesting, movement, moving, ngiht, night photography, Photography, shutter speed, slow shuter speed, tips
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At night, if you’re using what light there is, you need capitalize on it. One option is to look for silhouettes where you capture a subject in front of a light source.
In this image shot in New York after dark on a wet night I used the lights of the oncoming traffic to backlight this woman as she walked down the road trying to hail a cab.
Because she was moving fast I was walking behind her at a similar pace so there was no chance to stop or use a slow speed so this image had the ISO set high to capture what light I had.
Labels: backlight, ISO, light source, night, night photography, Photography, silhouettes, tips
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While a flash is handy for taking snapshots of friends, it’s useless when the subject is more than about 10-15 feet away as this is the range of a typical flash. It also makes it impossible to shoot candid images.
So, the best solution to shooting at night is to turn the flash off – before you head out, make sure you know how to disable the camera’s flash so it doesn’t fire.
If your camera lets you do so, set the ISO equivalent to use for capturing the shot, increase this at night to 1600 or more. In the shot above the ISO was 6400, the image is grainy but a flash would have disturbed the couple and that would have spoiled the candid moment.
The shots will be more grainy – like film, shots taken at higher ISO levels are more grainy even when shot digitally. However, grain is not a ‘bad thing’ and night time images can look particularly interesting when the film grain is obvious.
Labels: disable flash, film look, flash, grainy, ISO, low light, night, night photography, no flash, Photography, tips
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At night what can look very uninteresting during the day can take on an entirely different look.
A single light on a wall or a neon sign can make an interesting shot and, when it is raining you’ve got a double bonus of night lights and reflections in the wet surfaces.
Labels: interest, interesting images, low light, night, night photography, Photography
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When the sun goes down, a world of different lights opens up and it’s a great time to pull out your camera for some stunning photos. However, before you go out to shoot at night, there are some things to think about that will help you take great shots even when the lighting isn’t ideal.
Today we’re starting a new tip series – shooting right at night and here’s the first tip:
At night, there’s obviously less light than there is during the day. So, to get good shots you either have to replace the missing light with a flash, or open up the aperture so more light gets in and slow the shutter speed so the camera gets enough light to register the image. You can also up the ISO – in the next few tips we’ll look at each of these options in more detail and find some great topics for shooting at night.
Labels: aperture, light, light capture, low light, Photography, shooting at nght, shutter speed, technique, tip
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There’s something very compelling about panoramic images. They’re much wider than regular photos and, instead of showing the small portion of a scene that is in front of the camera lens, they show much more.
Some panoramas show a semi circle around a point and others wrap around a full 360 degrees showing everything there is to see. Panoramas have been popular with photographers since the early days of photography. Then, as now, they were created using a series of side by side images put together to form a single seamless image.
Today’s digital cameras and photo editing software let you create panoramas quite easily. Even simple cameras like prepaid phone cameras and point-and-shoot cameras are advanced enough to have a panorama setting. There are, however, some tips and tricks for taking the photos that will help ensure you get a great panorama and I’ve thrown in my best solution for when things go wrong!
When you take photos for your panorama make sure you stand in one position to take all the shots. It is easiest if you fix the camera to a tripod and test to ensure it will swing around smoothly to capture the images that you want to take. If you don’t have a tripod, practice standing in one position and rotating your body to capture the images.
This painted sign on the building above was too large to capture in one shot but it works well as a panorama.
When taking the individual shots for a panorama, make sure that the photos overlap each other by around 25 percent. This means that the objects that appear on the far right of one photograph should appear on the far left of the next photograph in the sequence.
If your camera has a panorama feature you can use this to help configure the overlap for the images. Your photo editing software uses the overlapping areas as a key for aligning and matching the images so it’s important that you have enough of an overlap for the software to do its work. On the flip side, avoid having too much overlap as that’s not desirable either.
Try to photograph scenes that don’t change rather than subjects that are moving as it’s much harder to match up your images if people are moving around in them such as in this image:
I had to put a lot of work into tidying up this image – with so much action it was far from an ideal topic for a panorama but the results were worth it.
When capturing photos for a panorama make sure that you do not alter your camera settings, such as the zoom, between shots as this will mess up your images and they won’t be easy to match.
If you’re using a digital SLR camera, keep the exposure the same between shots too. Using Aperture priority mode is a good choice.
There are some classic occasions when a panorama is an obvious solution and I dream of one day spending an afternoon at Lord’s capturing that wonderful cricket ground as a panoramic image. Other shots that work well as panoramas include scenery and landscapes. However panoramas aren’t limited to major spectacles and you can capture a series of two or more images of anything from a sign to a streetscape and assemble it into a panorama.
I’ve shot panoramas of signs, cityscapes, the mounting yard at a racecourse and I’ve done one of my street so one day I will be able to look back and see then what I see now, as I stand on my front porch.
If you’d like to learn more about creating Panoramas, check out this post on Creating Panoramas with a twist. It’s a great way to save an imperfectly shot panorama.
http://www.projectwoman.com/2009/04/photoshop-panorama-with-twist.html
Labels: fix settings, how to, overlap, overlapping images, panarama, Photography, photography how to, settings, tripod
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I want one of these tripods. No more bending down to look through the viewfinder because it never winds high enough. No more adjusting the camera to change from shooting landscape to portrait.
This tripod works with you. It does just what you want it to when you want it. It’s on my list for Santa this year, for sure.
P.S. What the heck was this girl thinking? I never once saw the tripod touch the ground. It really was very funny to watch. Here she does another portrait orientation shot with it – notice how she’s rotated the camera to get the tripod in a more accommodating position.
Labels: Photography, tripod
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