LESSON 7Capture Dramatic Night Views

A tripod is the most effective tool for taking beautiful photographs of night views. When shooting in low-light situations like night views, the shutter speed slows down to increase the amount of light entering the camera, and the ISO sensitivity becomes higher. As a result, the image tends to become unclear because of camera shake, or grainy with the increased noise.

This photograph was shot with the shutter speed set to 3.2 sec. At this shutter speed, the image ends up completely blurred, no matter how hard the photographer tries to remain still.

If you secure the camera on a tripod, you can shoot a clear photograph without blur even at slow shutter speeds. At the same time, set the ISO sensitivity to the lowest possible value. Although this will further slow down the shutter speed, you don’t need to worry about blur because the camera is secured on a tripod. Also, the low ISO sensitivity can reduce noise. The minimum value of the ISO sensitivity varies by model, but values from ISO100 to ISO 400 are recommended.
When you use a tripod, disable the SteadyShot function to avoid malfunctioning. Also, the vibration of the camera resulting from the press of the shutter button may cause blur. Setting the 2-second self-timer is an effective way to prevent such blur.

If you have learned to shoot without blur, adjust the brightness and color based on your image.
The brightness can be adjusted with exposure compensation. Human eyes recognize the night sky as "dark," and the lights of buildings and illuminations as "bright." However, the camera tries to render all scenes with the same brightness standard, whether they are dark or bright. As a result, when shooting night views where dark parts (like the night sky) and bright parts (like building lights) are mixed, the exposure determined by the camera may not properly reproduce the brightness felt by human eyes. This makes it difficult to get the desired results when shooting night views; the night sky may look washed out, or the colors of street illuminations may look clipped.

In addition, the brightness of the photograph is also affected by the settings of the camera itself, such as the Creative Style/Creative Look settings.
First, try shooting without exposure compensation, and adjust the exposure based on the results.

Without exposure compensation, this photograph became underexposed because of the strong street lights. The cityscape behind the building blacked out. By setting the exposure to +0.7, the photograph was rendered with appropriate brightness.

Now, let’s move on to color adjustment. You can use white balance to adjust the overall color tone. Auto white balance [AWB], in which the camera automatically determines the color tone, can reproduce the actual colors faithfully. However, when shooting night views of a city, selecting [Fluorescent: Warm White] will add a bluish tone. This may be more suitable for conveying the characteristics of artificial lighting.
Also, strong lights, such as urban buildings and illuminations, tend to become whitish in a photograph, and their colors do not look as vivid as expected. If this happens, adjust the saturation to the + side from the option settings in Creative Style/Creative Look, so that the lights will be more vivid and colorful.