Conventional skills of shooting night scenes

Lead: No matter the city or the natural scenery, the night photos are very charming. But not many people dare to take pictures at night, because everyone knows that the light is too bad to take pictures in one night. It's really not easy to take a photo. But there are also routines for night shooting. If you use these routines well, night shooting will be handy.

The routine skills of shooting night scenes all say that it is difficult to shoot night scenes. The old driver tells you that the routine is over!

The biggest difficulty in taking pictures at night is that the light is too dim. You should know that taking pictures is the art of running out of light, and you can shoot a hammer without light! Therefore, shooting night scenes is actually a challenge to the low light environment. There are many ways to increase the exposure of a digital camera, but obviously it is not enough for the camera to face the night scene. You need some accessories to cooperate. After preparing the equipment, put on the night routine, and the night photo is just a shutter! Compared with other scenes, the routine of night scene shooting is full of sincerity and can basically be applied to most situations. Let's talk about these routines to save novices who shoot at night.

1. Select a camera with a hand board.

First, choose a camera suitable for shooting night scenes. Night scenes don't have high requirements for cameras, so they don't need high sensitivity, good image quality and fierce continuous shooting. In other words, camera performance is not the most important. However, it requires high imaging clarity and color. This means that the camera needs to have good color performance and accurate white balance. The lens quality should be high.

Poor color performance and inaccurate white balance. When shooting city night scenes, the effect of complex light mixing can be imagined. If the lens quality is not high, the diffraction and atomization will be obvious in the face of direct lighting in the city, which will also affect the night scene recording. However, because most night photos are taken on tripods with low sensitivity and slow shutter speed, it is not necessary to pursue high-quality large sensor cameras before, and there is no need to capture them. Just take them quietly one by one.

The camera for this demonstration is Fuji X-T2, which is just an APS-C camera. However, the color performance of Fuji and the high definition of Fuji lens are well known. The high-sensitivity image quality below ISO3200 is better than that of some full-frame cameras, which can fully meet the needs of night scene shooting.

Step 2 wait for a sunny day

Most night photos are taken of scenery, so good weather is very important. It is naturally not suitable for taking pictures when it is windy and rainy. Now urban pollution is also very serious. In addition to the bad weather, we should also consider whether the smog is serious. It is natural that you can't take a good night photo in foggy days. However, you can't change the weather, you can only wait until a weather suitable for shooting night scenes appears.

Whether the urban smog is serious or not can be judged by whether the naked eye can see the top of the tall building.

How to predict the weather? Watch the weather forecast, of course! However, it is not enough to forecast sunny days. Might as well check the wind. In a slightly windy weather, the smog in the city will be less serious, and the night photos taken will be much more transparent. Considering the environment of shooting large films at will abroad, there is still some helplessness in wanting to shoot city night scenes.

Step 3 choose a good time

The quality of night photos is closely related to the shooting time. It is inevitable to shoot the sky and the ground when shooting scenery, so how the sky and the ground effectively determine the final photo effect. Many people think that the night scene is a photo taken in the dark. In fact, the best shooting time is a short time before sunset, and the sky is not completely dark.

Get ready at the shooting location before dark and before the building lights are turned on.

? Start shooting when the city lights are on and the sky brightness is close to the building.

Shoot before dark, and don't have too much architectural lighting.

It was getting dark before shooting, and the sky gradually changed color.

The most beautiful night view of the city is the lighting of the building, but if you only take pictures in the dark night, the sky is likely to be dark. The sky, which occupies half of the picture, is black and obviously eclipsed. So we should take pictures after dusk when the sky is dark and the city lights are on. As far west as possible. At this time, the sun still has a little effect, and the sky presents a beautiful gradient. So we need to wait at the shooting location before sunset, decide the location and composition of the night scene, and wait until it gets dark before shooting. The time to take pictures in the sky is only about 5- 15 minutes, and it gets dark quickly in winter, so be prepared to solve the shooting within 5 minutes.

4. Be sure to use a tripod.

Tripod is a necessary photographic accessory for shooting night scenes. Other accessories are optional, but a tripod is essential. Because of the dark light at night, when shooting night scenes, we often need to expose for a long time for 5- 10 seconds, which may be blurred when holding or simply placing. A stable tripod is very important.

When using a tripod, you can use the cable release or the camera's self-timer function. Because there are few snapshots taken at night, setting the self-timer function for 2 seconds and counting down the camera for 2 seconds can reduce the vibration caused by pressing the shutter. This is very important for shooting for a few seconds. Remember to set it up before shooting.

5, landscape photos: small aperture, low sensitivity, long exposure time.

If you want to shoot the city lights at night and want to be full of momentum, a wide-angle lens is essential. This time, it is a Fuji 14mm F2.8 lens, which is equivalent to a 2 1mm wide-angle lens and is more suitable for shooting city night scenes. The sense of space perspective is moderate, and the architectural lines will not be too weird because of exaggeration.

? Set a lower ISO.

The ISO setting for shooting night scenes is low, because there is no need to solidify moving objects, so try to reduce the sensitivity to ensure the image quality, and turn on the long-time exposure noise reduction function of the fuselage. Set the lowest ISO value here.

Landscape photography pursues a wide range of depth of field to ensure that all objects in the shot picture can be clearly imaged. At this time, it is necessary to use a smaller aperture to expand the depth of field and avoid blurring the outside of the focused object. It is recommended to focus on the farthest object, but avoid focusing at infinity, because infinity often cannot guarantee that all objects in the picture are clear. Here the aperture is set to F 1 1. It is worth noting that the aperture should not be set too small, otherwise there will be obvious diffraction phenomenon in the light.

Wide-angle night shot

When shooting some tall buildings, we can lower the plane position and record some elements close to the ground, which can make the picture more imposing. When using a tripod, use the tripod with the lowest height possible.

After lowering the fuselage, we can open the folding screen of the camera, because the camera is very close to the ground at this time, it is almost impossible for a SLR camera to view with an optical viewfinder, and it is difficult for a single camera to look at the screen with an LCD screen normally. If there is a folding screen at this time, you should make good use of it. Very useful when shooting at low angles.

Night view near the ground

6. Portrait photography: large aperture, high sensitivity, and appropriate flash.

The biggest problem of taking pictures at night is the lack of light, so if you want to take portraits at night, you need the hardware of the camera to assist. For high-sensitivity large aperture lens, if there is an external flash, use the external flash to turn off the light and reflect the flash to fill the light for the person, increase the exposure of the camera as much as possible, and ensure sufficient shutter speed, so that the image of the person can be solidified when capturing the portrait. Here we shoot portraits with Fuji 35mm F 1.4 lens.

When shooting portraits at night with a large aperture lens, in order to ensure sufficient exposure, we try to shoot with a large aperture lens, which tests the imaging quality of the large aperture lens. Because the quality of Fuji single lens is good, even the maximum aperture still has good imaging quality.

In order to make the shutter speed faster and the sensitivity as high as possible, Fuji X-T2 has a good high sensitivity, but considering that it is an APS-C format sensor, ISO setting below 3200 can have better imaging performance. The main means to increase exposure is to use a large aperture.

7. More night photos

? Urban night scene shooting is mainly to record the colorful city, but also pay attention to the color performance of the camera. When shooting night scenes, you should choose a camera with better color performance and record more scenes with gorgeous lights. Of course, at present, the city calls for environmental protection and energy saving, and decorative lights will not be turned on every night. We can shoot night scenes on some special holidays to ensure the shooting effect of city night scenes.

Summary: There are not many routines for night shooting, and compared with the more changeable capture techniques, night shooting techniques can often produce good results even mechanically. You might as well practice more on a sunny night to improve your night shooting ability.