During these short days and long nights, low-light photography can be intimidating. Here’s some simple tips by SmugMug on what you should keep in mind when shooting and sharing pictures at the darkest time of the year.
Know Your Gear
Photography is about capturing light (like in these National Geographic images), so low-light shooting means maximizing the amount of light hitting your sensor. There are three ways to do this:
- Allow more light through the lens
- Keep the shutter open longer
- Boost the sensitivity of your sensor
How? Widen the aperture of your lens, slow down your shutter speed, or raise your ISO, respectively. If you’ve never done any of this before, dig up your camera’s manual (or Google for the PDF version) and get to know these three things now.
Shooting in your camera’s Manual mode is the most tricky – but a surefire – way to learn these principles, but you can also try Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority modes to fix one of the settings and let your camera automatically calculate the rest.
Knowing which buttons to push and which dials to turn is a priceless skill to have, and you should commit it to muscle memory now so you don’t end up panicking in the dark.
Additionally, your camera and lenses often have specific limitations. If you have an older camera, for example, you may not want to push the ISO above 1600. And some lenses simply don’t open up wider than f/5.6.
Embrace Your Grain
Even if your images come out a bit grainy from pushing your ISO, that’s OK. Think about all the film photos you’ve probably seen from 30 to 50 years ago and you’ll notice the grain adds a lot of character to the image. It makes sense to embrace it and get to know it a little better.
Grain itself can contain quite a bit of colour that may not be found otherwise in your scene. To minimise it, try third-party noise-reduction software, or experiment with the noise-reduction feature in programs that you’re already using, like Lightroom and Photoshop.
Alternatively, try converting your image to black and white and playing around with the contrast. Photos that look weird at first look cool and edgy once the colour’s stripped out. To do this, give it a quick conversion using SmugMug’s Image Editor, PicMonkey, or Lightroom.
Make More Light with Lightroom
Modern digital cameras give you quite a bit of leeway with the exposure, so if your image came out a bit dark (which happens because your camera’s LCD often gives a brighter impression of your image than you actually took), it’s OK to bump the exposure in post.
For most, pushing the “Exposure” slider is sufficient, but some pixel peepers may suggest using the more specific sliders you can find below that: highlights, whites, and shadows. These boost only the pixels you need without harming the rest. Experiment with what works best for you to get the look you want.
Seek the Moment, Not Perfection
Above all, don’t stress about getting the perfect shot every time. Blurred motions, being too dark (or too bright) are all details that take your photo beyond basic shape and colour. So be sure to capture the action, the intensity, and the joy of what you and your friends are doing. Here’s a guide to mixing it up and getting out of a photo rut.
What’s SmugMug?
It’s a photo-sharing and image-hosting site that allows users to upload HD photos and videos to their safe and beautiful SmugMug sites. Visit smugmug.com for a free 14-day trial and after that, membership starts at $5/month – about £3.
