At night cities, streets, landscapes, they all look different and interesting. Highways turn to river of lights, structures and buildings glows like a star in the night, and you can take advantage of this and capture some unusual photographs. It is not that hard to take night pictures, there are only few differences between taking pictures during day and night;

Use a Tripod;

At night, naturally light amount is low and for that reason you can not set your shutter to a fast speed.(your picture will be too dark if you set it to fast speed in a dark environment.). Since shutter speed determines how long it will take to capture a picture , a slow shutter speed will cause longer time to take the picture, as time gets longer your probability to vibrate your camera will increase thus will cause a blury picture which is not good. To avoid shaking hands, use a tripod at night photography.

Use a Shutter Release Cable (or Use Timer)

Even if you are using tripod, to have a sharp photograph, do not press your shutter release button use a shutter release cord oruse timer instead. Because probably you’ll vibrate your camera by pressing the button even it is on a tripod. You can avoid this possibility by using a shutter release cable which is an apparatus that lets you release your shutter form a distance without touching your camera. Most of them have functions like half-pressing and bulb. Half-pressing to the button on the cord will exaclty do the same thing with the button on your camera, sets the focus and calculates required settings for given light (if you have a auto-camera). Bulb function lets you leave the shutter open as long as you press the button.

If you don’t have a remote release cable, then you can use your camera’s timer for night photograpy. Set the composition and the values, change your camera’s mode to timer and then press the release button, that way you may be able to take the picture without touching your camera.

Long Exposure

As i mentioned before you need to use longer exposures for night photography. But there’s no right exposure time, you have to find it by trying yourself. You are lucky if you have a camera with built-in light-meter that can tell you the recomended settings for light amount of the scene. If you believe you have a very nice scene in front of you and you don’t want to miss this shot, so take a picture with the recomended settings, take another one with a longer exposure and another one with shorter exposure that way at least one of your pictures will be a good one. Of course you are more lucky if you have a DSLR that lets you see the pictures immediately. But if you have a film camera with no light-meter on it, it is all up to your eyes and experience. And the last tip for night photography; do not measure the light directly from the brightest spots or light sources (also not from the darkest spots). Light sources might be too bright in the picture but it is ok, the difference between the dark places and the light ones are so big that you can’t do anything about it.

Holding the Camera when taking Night Photographs

If you can’t use a tripod for a reason and you want to take the picture by holding your camera in your hands, let me tell you that, this won’t be easy and won’t be the best results in terms of quality of picture. but anyway here is what you can do;

• Use a fast film or fast ISO speed (if you are using a digital camera). You should use films or ISO values that more sensitive to light, like faster than ISO400. If it is really dark you can use even ISO1600. But of course there will be consequences for that, sensitivity to light also brings grains with it, which is not very good. The faster the film, the more grain you’ll get.
• Open your aperture as much as possible ; this will help you take the pictuer in a shorter time but also will shorten the depth of field. (Apperture gets bigger as the apperture value reduces. Ex. f5.6 lets more light in than f11)

Here there are some night photography example pictures that i took;