Low Light Photo Exercise
Written by: Derek Watterson, Graphic Designer
One of the concepts all beginners need to understand is that all your camera can do is capture light. This exercise will help you understand how your camera sees light. The easiest time to take photographs is during the daytime when light is plentiful. If you can take good photographs at night you can take photographs at any time.
Low Light Exercise
- Have a camera tripod ready.
- Wait until the sun has gone down. Inside and outside light is much lower once the sun goes down.
- Find a good place anywhere to experiment.
- Set your Flash off and set your camera up in a tripod or secure location.
- Meter the light (there may not be much but it’s there) and set shutter speed and aperture accordingly. Try your first shot with the aperture as open as possible.
What You’ll learn
Steady
Chances are, unless you have a lens with a very wide aperture, as soon as you block out natural lighting you’ll experience camera shake and be required to use a tripod. Not only will you need a tripod to hold the camera steady but you’ll also need whatever you’re shooting to stay still in order to take a sharp photograph.
Motion Photography
You may find in this exercise a niche that you’ll love where the photography embraces motion in a long exposure. The stereotypes you’ve surely seen are typically of merry-go-rounds, city landscapes at night with cars making colored red and white lines down the street. Be more creative than that and make the ordinary extraordinary! Realize that while your camera’s shutter is open the camera is a canvas for the moving light to paint on, use that knowledge to your advantage.
Color
You’ll find that if you get the exposure right you can shoot a picture in the daytime and then shoot the same shot with a long exposure and the colors will be different. This is because sunlight casts a different white balance than the moonlight, streetlights, etc.
Share what you learned about Low Light Photography
Share other things you’ve learned about low light photography from this exercise or share other activities you’ve done to improve your low light photography skills.
Submit your Low Light Photographs
Submit low light photographs you’d like to show off as a jpg.
this is really helpful, question though… when your apeture is wide open… what should the shutter speed be on?
It depends on exactly how dark it is, and how wide your aperture opens. You can get a good starting place by following your light meter.
In the color the photos can you be clearer on how it was done? Are you saying to get more color in a picture you can use a long exposure?
Not necessarily more color just a different color than what you see in the day time because the light source is different- moon, stars and street lamps rather than sunlight. There will be more color than what you see with eye’s because you can’t see color as well in low light. Camera’s however, have the ability to store that light and then give it to you in one image. It’s a really cool reality that you just have to try!