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

1. Have a camera tripod ready.
2. Wait until the sun has gone down. Inside or outside light is much lower once the sun goes down.
3. Find a good place anywhere to experiment.
4. Set your Flash off and set your camera up in a tripod or secure location.
5. 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-

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