Hi I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching
AdoramaTV for this episode we're going
to do a little night shooting
and we're here on the north bank
of the River Thames in London.
We've got lots and lots of things
to choose from.
Everything's being lit up really nicely
not only by just the illumination
of the buildings with their lights but also
there's a bit of light left in the sky
from the Sun. it's quite Twilighty
which is my favourite time to shoot
because we still got that punchy sky
in the backdrop.
I find it this kind of photography really calming
because your in one spot,
you don't have to run around,
you don't have to worry about losing
your kit or worrying about all your kit
you just set up.
Choose the lens you want to choose.
Choose the ISO you want to choose
and then just have a shot.
Now at the moment the camera is set it manual.
Everything's on manual and I'm about to
lock up the the mirror,
so that takes any kind of camera shake
and at the same time
we have to set the timer
on the camera to at least
a two second timer.
That way when the shutter releases
your hands are nowhere near the camera,
therefore it's going to give you
the stablest environment for the picture you can have.
So this longer lens
is allowing me to bring in the backgrounds a lot
and because there's still a bit of light
left in the sky,
my exposure at a 100 ISO is at f/11
so lots of depth of field,
is at 2.5 seconds,
so I don't have to worry
about using the shutter release
at the moment because
that only comes into play if the
exposure is more than 30 seconds.
Don't forget to cover the back up.
You can use it a little gizmo
on the strap or
you can use your hand
and that gives us our first image.
Now it's a little off so
I'm going to try it again.
So that's look a little better.
Now there's a few different ways of shooting
night pictures. Now you can do
it in absolute darkness
where you've just got
the buildings, the lights from the
buildings illuminating your subject,
you'll get that black sky
which is great because it stands right out.
You can also shoot them when you've got
a little bit of a difference in the light
from the sky to say the foreground
or the bottom part of the frame,
where the sky might be
a lot brighter than the bottom part
so therefore you can you do it
in two different ways.
You can either use a graduated neutral density filter
to try and even the light out
or you can bracket the shot
or you've got an exposure of a one
or two stops over what the computer
is telling you and one or two steps below
where the meter is telling you.
That should take in the difference between
the mid-tone the highlights
and the lowlights and then you can combine those
in the computer either in Photoshop
or Lightroom. It's a very simple, simple
straightforward thing to do these days.
Lightroom just does it for you now.
In the old days it was a little more
complicated but now it's pretty
straightforward. We'll just try another one.
Actually I'm going to change the
shot this time
because I've got Saint Paul's Cathedral
way in the background
and in the foreground I've got Waterloo Bridge
and I'm going to get some buses
going across that.
Might be even with any luck we'll blur them out.
So we're going to move on down
to the London Eye and try and put some even
greater movement in our pictures,
so we've we've moved along the river
a little bit with the London Eye behind me
for our next subject only up 150 metres
or so so like most major cities
there's lots and lots of things to shoot
at night in London.
Down the river we got Tower Bridge
a shard building, a tex-mex building
to the great Art Deco building
on this side of the river. So any city
I think any modern city around the world
is going to have all this great
architecture to use as your subject
and any luck a little bit of movement
say from cars or buses or whatever,
so in this shot I've changed lenses,
I've gone down to a smaller lens a 24-70mm
short or medium sized zoom lens.
I'm still shooting it around f/11 - f/16
100 ISO because I want maximum
depth of field
and maximum kind of clarity.
The one thing you should be careful
of though is getting too much noise
in the in the shadows.
So if you start using
higher ISO's for instance if you don't
have a tripod there's a good chance
you'll get some digital noise
and in the dark spots,
so we set the camera
again to 2 second timer.
I'm still only at a 20 second exposure,
so I don't have to really worry about a cable release yet
and I've got the the mirror locked
up to reduce any kind of camera shake.
Now you can focus manually but a really
good way of doing this is to set
the camera to live view.
To set the camera to live view by pressing the live
view button and at the moment you can't
really see this but we're going to,
we're going to change the exposure so we can
see our subject and then I'm going to
press the zoom button and that's a five
5%, five times zoom
and go as close to ten times
then I can manually
adjust the focus
so that it's dead-on,
because at night it can be a little
difficult to see what's actually focused.
Press that button again,
come out of it
and it will turn off the live view
and then we'll reset,
we'll reset our exposure.
So it's still a 20 second exposure.
Now with this 20 second
exposure what I would recommend
a partner instead of putting your hand up
here to block the light come through
the viewfinder, this time use the little
gizmo that's attached to your
camera strap or if it or indeed if your
camera has a little shutter door
on the eyepiece, stick it on there so it blocks
any kind of wayward light
coming in from the from the back,
if I can actually get
it on there.
So we're all set, once you're ready to go
just a matter of pressing the button
and letting the camera do the work.
Now we're going to 20 second exposure
and we're going to wait for it to work.
In the meantime I think the key to night shooting
is indeed finding the right locations.
Finding those subjects that are going to work
for you, what you're trying to get.
We're trying to get a bit of motion
and also a little bit of static shots
with our stuff tonight.
So buildings that have no motion in front of them,
just have bright lights
and other ones like this one
where we got that London Eye,
it looks like it's not moving
to the naked eye but it actually is moving
I think it's half an hour for a revolution
but using a long exposure in
this case 20 second exposure
should indeed give us an interesting picture.
So I think that's it for night photography.
Now if you follow these
simple steps; tripod for a stable environment,
picking the right subjects,
doing a little recce in your own city
to find all the great subjects
you too are going to get some really great pictures.
So thanks for watching,
I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV
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