Understanding Night Photography
Medium.com is a state-of-the-art in community-centered content management system providing a unique option for media types like us to write creative content. For this purpose, I am using Medium to explore my ideas in understanding how to become a better photographer.
Although, I would consider myself to be a skilled photographer, I am never settled with my level of work. There is always more knowledge to learn in that trade. Recently, I had the opportunity to collaborate with another professional photographer on a modeling shoot. More images from this shoot can be seen here:
Heather Photo Portfolio Page
In the early hours of the evening on set, I felt confident in the images I was producing. However, after the sun went down and it was dark outside, I struggled a little bit on how to get that great shot. My white balance seemed to be off, my ISO was way up to keep my shutter speeds correct as to not produce a blurry image. I managed to get okay shots, but I had a lot of post processing work to do in lightroom to make them look just right.
My first step in learning more about the process of night photography was to brainstorm subjects related to night photography. Below is a chart I created using Mindmeister.com to create a flow chart on the topics that are correlated with taking images at night.
I was able to brainstorm some very important factors that will effect the final image. I also wanted to go over the many different types of night photography. Different subjects will require different settings. There isn’t a one setting fits all in night photography. Understanding this and how to fully use my camera in manual mode to get the most prime shot straight from the camera will help me to become much more confident behind my camera the next time I am out on a night shoot.
