I have gotten a few questions on how to set the camera up for good night shots and there is really nothing to it this is what I normally do is very simple things. If you check your camera manual you should be able to follow the same settings.

Here is an example of a night shot that I have taken with my old Nikon D70s:

Nikon D70s, Taken from the roof top of the old tax building in the south end of stockholm using a tripod and long exposure. 30 second exposure and f/20.

Equipment

The most important tool of night photography is the tripod. If you do not have one, or can not take one to the place you wish to shoot from, then you should seriously consider again if it is not possible. Perhaps you can get someone to help you with it if the problem is carrying it. Perhaps you can get one of these small tripods or perhaps a gorillapod to use instead?

Bangkok, handheld D70s in the night

Another useful item is the bean bag which is basically a fabric bag which has been filled to 2/3rds with rice, small beans or some other such useful type of grain. This bag is great because you can use it anywhere, it forms an cushions your camera nicely and it will help you also with macro photography. You need usually two bean bags, one under your camera house, the other under your lens as support.

The next very useful item is the remote release for the shutter. If you don’t want to invest in a remote shutter release cable or IR remote for your camera you can use the timer on the camera to delay the actual photo taking between 5-20 seconds. This is because you want the camera to take the picture and be completely shake free. If you are using a cable release then make sure it is not tight when you shoot so you are pulling the camera. Using the IR remote is usually never a problem, but does require batteries and they don’t work with all cameras. Almost all cameras have the timer though and putting that on say 10 seconds delay is usually quite enough to make sure the camera is not shaking when the picture is taking.

Camera settings

If you are using a digital SLR camera (dSLR) then you should also consider the mirror lock-up mode that many cameras have now. The mirror when it moves produce vibrations and they can be very difficult to get rid of especially if your shutter time is in the region of 1/30 s down to 2 s. The remote release or timer release does not help here. So if your camera do not have this feature try to avoid this region of shutter times completely to avoid the mirror slap to shake the camera and thereby produce a blurry picture.

City hall in Banja Luka

The ISO setting on the camera should be the setting that produce minimum noise. This is usually the lowest ISO setting on the camera although in some cases the camera sensor can be optimized for a slightly higher ISO as the premium in regard to noise. On the Nikon D300 for example the recommended lowest setting is ISO 200 although the camera can go -1 EV down from this (one full stop) that means ISO 100 the manual actually state the quality of the photos are usually better at ISO 200. Consult your manual. Always turn off the auto iso mode because otherwise the camera will increase the ISO setting automatically when it sees your dark frame when you are trying to take a picture.

Never use high ISO if you can avoid it. The pictures will be noisy and or grainy. However if you don’t have the tripod or just want to experiment you can set the ISO to whatever you want and have a blast. Here is an example of handheld shooting in the middle of the night with very high sensitivity on the camera, ISO 3200 which does produce quite a bit of noise but in this case it was not too bad for the picture since it was quite foggy anyway:

Handheld shot using high ISO 3200 on a D300. Lens was Nikkor AF-S DX VR 16-85/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF

Turn off Active D-Lighting or high dynamic range if your camera has such features. They are designed to “compress” the dynamics in the image by increasing the luminance in the dark parts and decreasing it in the highlights. The decreasing of highlights is not bad for this but the lifting of the shadows does produce a fair amount of extra noise. Make sure these features are turned off before you go shooting in the dark your you may be very disappointed with your camera.

The glass obelisk in the middle of Stockholm City. A bench was used as a support instead of a tripod, but it was not enought so the ISO was raised also. On the D70s you can see that it causes a lot of noise.

Use a sensible aperture, something like f/8 is usually great, it gives you a good depth of field DOF or focus depth to work with and it allows you to take pictures that are sharp from a few meters away all to infinity. So even if you miss the focus slightly your pictures will still be sharp.

Use spot focusing on a single point and pre-focus before you actually take the shot. Use the autofocus if it works, with some cameras it can be difficult to get it working well in darkness, but there is usualluy some contrasts the camera can work with. Then flip the focus to manual so it will not auto-focus at all then then use the time or cable release to take the picture. The reason for this is to avoid that the camera starts “hunting” for focus and misses what you are trying to photograph or get a very bad out of focus picture.

Use sensible focal lengths. Usually you can leave the 600 mm behind, somewhere from 12-300 mm is your useful focal range when working in the darkness. Wide angles can be effective, so can telephoto lenses but they are more difficult due to their extension and heavy weight. You need a very good tripod to use a 300 mm in the night with 15 seconds shutter time.

I also recommend that you take fresh batteries, at least here in Sweden it is getting rather cold at night and batteries that are not fresh may stop working suddenly when the temperature drops. Charge everything during the day before you go on a night shoot.

Set the camera to aperture priority mode (A) and then select an aperture somewhere around f/8 is a good starting point for most night shots. A too wide aperture and you will get a very shallow focus field which means that you have to work hard to get the focus where you want it, the cameras autofocus is often wrong in bad light.

Winter night shot. Using tripod. The weird colours in the sky are reflected sodium lights from the near by highway.

Set the camera to single shot mode. With the exposures you may expect it just don’t make sense to set the camera to continuous shooting mode.

Use raw mode. This helps a lot, whatever mistake you do you have a much better chance of fixing it if you shoot raw and use your cameras software to convert that into whatever format you are happy with using. Lots of post processing software from the free Picasa program to the more expensive Adobe Lightroom can also read and use camera raw files directly from the most well known brands!

If you have various settings on your raw, use raw without compression (or non-destructive compression) and the highest bit rate you can afford.

Summary

Camera settings

• White balance to auto or to daylight neutral. You may experiment with this because neon lights have very different light temperatures.
• Use the mirror lock-up mode when available, especially if you are shooting in the 1/30 – 2 s range.
• ISO 200 – Auto ISO must be turned OFF, or the camera will try to increase the ISO automatically.
• Turn off Active D-Lighting and other such features
• Use only RAW, set it to 14 bits and no compression if you can
• Single shot mode
• Aperture priority (A) mode with f/8 or a similar aperture. Useful apertures range from f/4 to about f/11 in most cases.

Equipment

• Tripod – your important tool, bean bags or similar
• Cable release or IR release

• Continuous shooting (Ch or continuous high)
• Tracking autofocus
• Aperture priority
• ISO200
• Center focus
• Matrix metering
• White balance daylight/cloudy
• RAW format

Here are my arguments for each of these settings.

Continuous shooting this is great because if something happens unexpectedly you just point and keep shooting frame after frame and you might get that special picture even if you was not ready to compose and wait for the moment. Things happens fast in the street so be prepared. A useful lens to have mounted is a superzoom, 18-200 mm or similar, they give you great range and can handle almost any urban situation. The drawback is of course that superzooms are a compromise and may lack sharpness for example.

Tracking autofocus this means the camera keeps focussing all the time even if you keep shooting frame after frame. This is good for tracking moving objects but you have to be aware where the focus points are in your frame. On Nikon cameras this is AF-C (Autofocus continuous). Single time focusing is called AF-S.

Aperture priority or the “A” mode on the camera. This allows you to select the aperture for best depth of field and focus and the camera will automatically pick the apropriate shutter time for a good exposure. This means you don’t have to worry about the exposure and you still maintain a high level of control. Most lenses are sharpest when they are stopped down 2-3 steps. For most this means that f/5.6 – f/11 is probably the best choice in broad daylight. As your light diminish, keep shooting but open the aperture to f/3.5 or f/2.8 or even further if your lens supports it! Most superzooms can not open byond 3.5 at their broad end and 5.6 at their far end.

ISO200 this is a good setting because it minimises the noise from the sensor. If the light conditions are low, raise it but do it with caution since it can produce severely grainy images. Some cameras are much better than others though, you may want to experiment with this. But if your light conditions do not require it—keep your ISO low.

Center focus is preferred because thats where you aim. Use the AF-L (autofocus lock) button to lock if you wish to recompose. The reason center focus is so nice is that if something happens quickly you tract it the focus system has a better chance of concentrating on the object you are tracking. On Nikon cameras the 21 point focus system is great. On the older models as the D70 that has a very limited number of focus points use the single center dot.

Matrix metering means the camera is ready for most light conditions. Activate the “highlight” function on your display to see if the metering has overexposed the picture, then use the exposure compensation setting +/- to change, recompose and take another shot. Using spot metering it may be very difficult to get the right exposure when there are multiple light sources as it generally is in the city. Centre weighted can sometimes be useful but most of the time matric metering is the best.

White balance does not matter too much if you are shooting RAW which you should be anyway… you can always correct this afterwards in your post processing because RAW files keep the sensor data as it was while JPEG will apply the white balance to the final picture. If you are shooting JPEG then set your WB accordinly, if you are shooting RAW you may do so but auto is usually fine as well.

RAW format is great because it allows you to adjust exposure and white balance with the maximum dynamics in the picture. In RAW you can easily correct 1 EV underexposure but if you attempt to do this on a JPEG the picture usually does not fare well.

JPEG format is not listed above but still very useful in certain situations… There is one time I will flip to JPEG when shooting street phot and that is when I will be taking long series of pictures of some event such as marathon runners or similar. The reason is that when I shoot RAW my camera buffer overloads after a few pictures and the camera can not fire as rapidly as in the beginning because it has to wait for the memory card to “swallow” all the data. Since JPEG images are pre-compressed before they are written to the memory card they are smaller and thus allows me to shoot very long series of pictures before the camera memory buffer is full and it starts to “stutter”. Don’t forget to set it back to RAW when you are done!