How to take Good Pictures at Night on the Road – when you are on travel around the evening, because you want to live the places you visited, the topic becomes important. In summer, the longer days allow you to have good lighting conditions for a longer time, but it is not uncommon, however, the outdoors is too dark for the camera. In winter, of course, the darkness starts already at five o’clock in the evening and so there are many times when you find yourself shooting in difficult conditions.
In addition, you often can not plan what you will see in the evening, probably you will find yourself in front of an extremely attractive person at a time is not favorable and certainly not be able to come back later. A peculiarity of the trip is then that you typically can not carry all your gear or at least the heavier equipment. This often means that, if you have a high-level camera, such as a full-frame, you probably left it at home for his excessive clutter. The same applies to any targets with maximum opening very wide but are more bulky and heavy.
How to take Good Pictures at Night on the Road : The problems in evening trip
Easily, many places that are worth visiting in the night provided that, they are nicely illuminated along with the movement of vehicles and people, elements shows up that are not visible during the day, but extremely photogenic. So, although it is significantly more difficult to take good photos at night on the road, at the same time can be very attractive.
Among the many issues, majors are Noise, using wrong settings, using Flash etcetera.
How to take Good Pictures at Night on the Road : For God’s sake, turn off the flash
The first thing is to do to get some pictures is to turn off the flash. We are speaking of course of the built-in flash in compact cameras and DSLRs. Not infrequently, I have seen many photographers to shoot, most likely in fully automatic mode even with their expensive SLR and then let the camera decide whether to activate the flash. The result of this behavior is often a photo in which the subject that interests you, probably several meters away, it is very dark while the foreground, often of minor interest, is excessively illuminated by the flash. In other cases the opposite happens. Do you want to photograph a person in front of a monument that stands a few feet away ? With the flash, the person will be somewhat enlightened, while the monument will probably will be too dark.
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In fact, using the automatic modes, when the scene is too dark, the camera fires the flash trying to lighten the entire scene. They may not know they want to properly exposed subject to a distance of 10 m far from the 2-3 m range with the built-in flash. For your camera, any outdoor night scene is too dark. The best solution is to switch to a semi-automatic mode (shutter priority or aperture mode) or manual mode. If these are still beyond your reach, there are some trade-offs: Sets the automatic mode without flash, set the mode of taking photos at night. Without flash, as you know, unfortunately, other problems will occur: pictures will tremendously blurry if the body is held on hand, due to the fact – shutter speed is too long or your photos will be reddish and grainy due to an excessive noise introduced by ISO levels too high. Let us see how to deal with these problems.
How to reduce noise at high ISO
The first thing to say is that the newer cameras have excellent performance at high ISO (especially if the segment is full frame and upwards) and the situation will get even better in the near future. If you have purchased a DSLR or a compact evolved over the last year, you can probably get to ISO 1600 introducing little noise or other noise that can be removed in post-production without losing too much quality.
In any case, regardless of the model of camera you have, you must know the maximum value of ISO which makes the photo usable with an acceptable amount of noise. Surely, searching the Internet, you can find this value by reading reviews and discussion in forums. However, you can also investigate personally. Do not evaluate the pictures on the camera’s screen, definitely they will seem less noisy, observe them on the computer screen. Try to play a little with noise reduction in a program of post-production.
The second option is – you can go to black and white. Now, obviously not all the situations make black and white photo to be eligible but know that it is a way to go. It can also be useful to reduce the overall exposure of the photo to hide the noise. Clearly this is a hard way.
This ends the part one of this guide on How to take Good Pictures at Night on the Road and here is the second part.
