In this episode learn a simple technique that will help you take great scenic shots at night
Adorama TV presents; Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV
I'm Mark Wallace here in very cold Prague it was actually snowing a
couple of seconds ago but I'm gonna take a picture of this beautiful river and
the bridge and this sort of scene of Prague here now what I could do because
it's sort of a low light in the day the sun is already behind the horizon what I could
do is try to get as much light as possible by opening up my aperture this
is at f/3.4 I'm shooting an aperture priority mode kicking my ISO up to 800
and then shooting. So I'm going to focus on infinity and take a shot here and when
I look at that shot its - at best, it's ok, not very good.
There are few things that we can do to really
make this shot amazing so let me show you a
couple of tools I'm going to use the first thing I'm going to do and it might be
a little bit counter intuitive, but I'm going to take my aperture and instead of
shooting at f/3.4 I'm going to close my aperture all the way down to f/16
It is going to make a really small aperture value.
What that is going to do is, that's going to give me a maximum depth of field and
it is also going to help all the little points of light back here when the sun goes
down to really look nice and sharp and give me some starburst shapes instead of
certain blobs back there and also it's going to make my shutter slow down
considerably and that slow shutter is going to smooth out the clouds and the water and
all of that stuff that's going to be much more effective. The other thing I want to do
is to reduce the noise in this image. So I'm going to go in here and take my ISO
800 all the way down to 200. That is the base, the lowest ISO that my camera
can use and because of those things now my cameras taking a longer exposure I
need to add a tripod. Now normally I'd use a big tripod but here we've got this
really nice solid base and so I can just pop these little teeny tripod
This is a Cullmann tripod on the bottom of my camera that's going to keep that from moving
and now my long exposure is going to be really nice and solid. Now the other
thing I want to do I don't want to touch my camera that's going to shake it so what I'll
do is I'm going to use a remote cable release. This is a really old school one
from my Leica but you can get these for any camera brand now that is going to
allow you to take a picture without touching the camera so it's not going to shake it
nice steady shot and the last tool that we're going to use and it's going make a
huge difference and this is sort of counter intuitive because we're shooting
at night. I'm going to add a 6 stop neutral density filter that I just happen to have in my pocket
here now at this guy does is it blocks the light, sort of like sunglasses for your
camera and so it's really, really dark and what that will do it'll even force a
longer exposure so now we're going to get up into the 1,2 and 3 minute exposure times
that's really going to make this look glassy now here's
a trick once you put this on your camera the lens is going to be so dark that you're
not going to be able to see through the lens and so what you'll have to do is
set your camera to manual focus
you have to manually focus that lens, now if you have a lens like this it
has a depth of field guide I suggest that you focus at hyper focal we've talked
about that past episodes if you don't just focus on infinity
because you have that really long extended depth of field you get a lot of
stuff in focus. Now the other thing I didn't mention I'm shooting with a wide
angle lens. I got a 21mm lens I think that's
imperative for a scene like that so once we have that all set I'm going to put my
neutral density filter on here, if you don't have manual focus, you just need to lock your focus
you can focus by looking through the eye piece lock that down and then put
your neutral density filter on so we'll put that on I've got a depth of field
gauge. So I'm going to set my focus at hyperfocal. This is a B+W 6 stop
neutral density filter alright! So that's on my camera, so I got my neutral density
filter, shooting at f/16 aperture priority mode ISO 200 and then lets
frame this up and take a picture and then we'll compare the before and after shot.
Alright so let's take this shot here
Alright so that was about a 1 second shot and that's okay but what we really need to do is one
last thing and that is wait for the sun to get lower in the sky because I really
want about a 60 second shot. Right now we are about 30 minutes from the Sun going
all the way down to give us that. So I need to wait about a half an hour I'll
take this picture again and then we'll compare our first shot that I did
hand-held, wide open, at high ISO, this shot that I shot for about a second with a
neutral density filter and then we'll compare that to our
last shot, shot after the sun goes down and we have a very long exposure
Alright well there you have it, and I'll think you'll agree that the shots we took after sundown
obviously I did those after we shot this video because it was at night, but you'll
agree that those shots are much better than the original shots
where the sun was up and I used a wide open aperture and it's really simple and
inexpensive tripod, an inexpensive cable release, an inexpensive neutral density
filter all told you're talking about $100 of add ons to get a much, much
better scenic photo and this works for all scenic photos so you can shoot these at
daylight and sunset, and cityscapes. It's really amazing. Thanks so much for
joining me and don't forget to check out the Adorama Learning Center because we've
got tons of stuff about shooting scenic photos and hyper focal focusing and all
that kind of stuff and don't forget to
subscribe to Adorama TV, it is absolutely free,
and that way you won't miss a single thing. Thanks again for joining me and I'll see
you again next time
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