Night Photography Basics: Your First Steps After Dark

A flimsy tripod is worse than none. It flexes in the wind and blurs a 20-second exposure, and it gives you the false confidence to try one. Use something rigid, hang a bag from the centre hook to add mass, and keep the centre column down, because raising it multiplies any vibration.

Use a remote release or the 2-second self-timer so your hand is not on the camera when the shutter opens. Switch off image stabilisation when the camera is locked down: the gyros can hunt for movement that is not there and add micro-blur to a long exposure.

Bring a headlamp with a red mode. White light kills your night vision for several minutes, and you will need that vision to see the frame edges, the focus ring and the ground under your feet.

Start in manual mode at your lens's widest aperture — f/2.8 or f/4 on most kit zooms. Set ISO 1600 and 15 seconds, shoot a test frame, then read the histogram rather than the rear screen, because a bright LCD makes dark files look brighter than they really are.

If the frame is too dark, open the aperture first, raise ISO second, and lengthen the shutter last. The order matters: longer exposures add noise and smear the stars, while a wider aperture and a higher ISO have their own costs that are easier to live with.

For city scenes, try f/8 at ISO 100 for 10 to 30 seconds. The smaller aperture gives sharper corners and cleaner colour, and the long exposure smooths traffic and water into streaks. Take one frame at each end of that range and compare before committing to a whole sequence.

Autofocus rarely works in the dark, so switch to manual focus, enter live view, magnify a bright star or a distant streetlight to 10x, and turn the ring until it becomes a pinpoint. A star is a better target than a building, because it stays the same size as you focus, while a soft-edged building can look sharp at several positions.

Do not simply twist the ring to the hard stop. Most lenses focus slightly past true infinity, which is why so many night shots come back soft. Find the point where the star is smallest, then tape the ring so it cannot drift during the rest of the shoot.

Once focus is set, do not refocus unless you move the camera or change the focal length. Most night blur comes from touching the lens, not from the tripod.

Urban and astro night photography want opposite things. A city wants a small aperture, low ISO and a long shutter to keep the lights crisp and the colour clean. A star field wants the widest aperture you own, a high ISO, and the shortest shutter that the light allows, because the stars move and the earth turns.

For stars, a common starting point is 15 to 25 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 3200, shortened as your focal length grows: the longer the lens, the faster the trails appear. Shoot a test, zoom to 100 percent, and check whether the stars are round or slightly elongated before you shoot a series.

For cities, include a foreground that is lit rather than black, and consider whether you want the traffic streaks to run across the frame or along it. Both are choices, and both change the picture more than a stop of exposure does.

Shoot RAW instead of JPEG so you keep the shadow detail you will need later; night files are almost always lifted in editing, and JPEGs fall apart quickly when you do. Enable long exposure noise reduction, or plan to subtract a dark frame yourself, which removes the hot pixels that appear in multi-second exposures.

Carry two spare batteries in a warm pocket, because cold drains them fast. Keeping them next to your body is the difference between a full night of shooting and going home after an hour. Condensation is the other cold-weather problem: let the camera warm up inside its bag before you take the lens cap off in a warm room.

Finally, review your first frame at 100 percent zoom before committing to a composition. A soft image looks perfectly sharp in a dark viewfinder, and it is much easier to fix while you are still standing in front of the subject.