When shooting 360 photos at night time, auto-exposure can do a bad job resulting in your
shots becoming blurry, overexposed, underexposed, too much contrast or too much noise. With the
correct camera settings, however, you can produce some truly amazing results at night time. So,
in this video, I'll share my best tips and tricks for getting awesome 360 photos in low light.
My first tip is to use a monopod, tripod, or fixed camera setup of some kind. Shooting
handheld when the light isn't good will greatly increase the chances of motion blur. Whereas,
if your camera doesn't move at all while shooting, the chances of motion blur will be zero.
So, which settings would you use? Well, there are multiple ways to expose your shots at night. The
fastest and easiest method I'd recommend in scenes that are dark but not too dark or in
mixed lighting is using the inbuilt HDR mode of your camera. This will automatically balance out
the shadows and highlights by capturing separate exposures for all strengths of light and combining
them together automatically into one photo. This is done exceptionally well with the Theta X. In
fact, it's so good that you don't need to do any colour correction to this image. So,
regardless of which camera you own, always start by trying HDR mode, ideally on a monopod.
However, what if it's really dark? In really low light, HDR mode won't always be the best
option because it does use auto-exposure on the individual exposures, which will want to turn the
ISO up and make your shots really noisy. This is where setting the exposure manually may just be
the best option. So, open up your manual exposure settings, and the primary setting you'll want to
change is the shutter speed. Basically, the longer the shutter speed you set, the more time you give
your camera to capture light for the photo. A one-second shutter speed,
think of it like opening the shutters in a room. A one-second shutter speed
allows one second of light to hit the camera sensor, brightening up the shot. This might
be appropriate for scenes that are dark but not that dark. A 30-second shutter speed however,
a 30-second shutter speed gives your camera 30 seconds to capture ambient light within
the environment, which, after a while, will help you light up even the darkest
location while also keeping noise to a minimum. Now, this isn't a one-size-fits-all setting. You
will want to adjust your shutter speed either up or down, depending on how bright your
shots turn out. But essentially, the longer your shutter speed, the brighter your shots
will be. Okay, the exposure is finished. Great! Anyway, if you do choose longer shutter speeds,
just be sure to one set your ISO as low as possible to avoid excess noise. Higher ISO
means higher noise, and this is something that can easily be avoided. And two, you'll probably
want to avoid being in the shot unless you hold really, really still. Since even the smallest
amount of movement can cause ghosting. Ghosting is another common issue at night where moving
subjects or elements become blurry or ghost-like. This is because low-light shots rely on longer
shutter speeds, which will blur even the smallest amount of movement. To fix this, hold really,
really still for the whole duration of the exposure if you do plan on being in the shot.
One effect you will want to move with, however, is the light painting effect. Light painting allows
you to draw in the sky of your night shots and has a serious wow factor. To do a light painting,
firstly, you'll need to find a really dark location. This is because you'll need a minimum
of 10 seconds to do your drawing, which means a 10-second shutter speed. This would completely
overexpose locations that already have a bit of light in them. So once you've found a dark
location, start by standing about six feet from the camera so your painting doesn't appear too
big or too small. Here, I'm setting the exposure to 20 seconds at the lowest ISO, then activating
a five-second countdown timer on the camera so I have time to get in position. Once the camera
started the exposure, I used the flashlight on my iPhone to write the numbers 360. However,
in order to separate the numbers, I had to turn the light off once I'd finished each number,
then turn it on again once I was in position to start the next one. If you're writing text,
you'll also need to write the characters backwards since the camera sees the reverse
perspective of what you see when facing it. Now, this effect will take a few attempts to
get right, but it will be well worth it for the final result. And you can try a range of
lighting effects, like walking around the camera with the light or even using lights of different
shapes and colours. A bit of creativity can go a long way with light painting. By the way,
if you want to learn how to make awesome tiny planet shots like my light painting,
feel free to download my free ebook, which shares hundreds of my best creative ideas.
Finally, if you're shooting longer exposures and your camera does have a raw option,
using raw will allow you to capture more detail and dynamic range while also offering more
flexibility to adjust the exposure in editing. Shooting in low light can definitely be tricky,
but between HDR mode and using longer shutter speeds, you should be able to get the best results
possible out of any type of nighttime situation. And if you're already taking stunning 360 photos
but you're struggling to share them due to limited sharing options, in this video here,
I'll share five great solutions that will help you share your 360 masterpieces with ease.