Digital Focus: Taking Pictures in the Dark
More strategies for taking photos after dark, plus printing tricks.Dave Johnson
Feature: Another Look at Night Photography
Want to point your digital camera at a different, less-traveled sort of subject? Try your hand at night photography. After all, when the sun goes down, many digital photographers tend to put their cameras away. But instead of just charging your batteries, why not take advantage of the evening for some creative photography?
About a year ago, I looked at how to get started in night photography. This week, let's dig a little deeper and see how to take better pictures after the sun sets.
Rods, Cones, and Color
Night photos can have a powerful impact because of their vibrant color. At night, your own eyes tend to see things in muted shades of gray, as the human eye is not adept at seeing color in the dark. But your digital camera has no such limitations. If you expose the picture long enough, you can capture the same bright, vivid colors in low light that you get in the daytime. And since people aren't expecting to see bright colors in low-light situations, you can get some eye-popping results.
Dealing With Digital Snow
It should come as no surprise that the heart and soul of night photography is the long exposure--you need to leave the shutter open longer to saturate the sensor with whatever light is actually available.
The principle downside of long exposures, though, is digital "noise," which presents itself as a myriad tiny flecks or digital snowflakes that make your photos look grainy. The reason you get digital snow in night photos is that the longer your camera's sensor has to work, the hotter it gets--and it's the heat that causes the noise.
So how do you minimize or eliminate noise in night shots? Cameras made in the last two or three years generate much less digital noise than older models. But you can keep the noise low by setting the camera's ISO control to its lowest level, which is usually about 100. If your camera has a "noise reduction" tool, you should turn that on as well. And you may find that you get less noise if you shoot pictures on cool evenings.
Bracketing Your Exposure
When you take a picture at night, you'll usually measure your exposure in seconds, not fractions of a second. But since your camera's exposure meter won't give you accurate readings, where do you begin? I recommend that you set your camera to its manual exposure mode and set the shutter to one second. Take a picture and see what it looks like. Not only will this give you a good idea of how much longer you'll need to expose the scene, but a one-second exposure helps you frame the scene without standing around for fifteen seconds waiting to see what the picture looks like.
After the first shot, you'll be able to fine-tune the framing and adjust your shutter. And don't forget--you don't have to make the shutter stay open longer to introduce more light. If digital noise is a concern, you can open the aperture to let in more light without changing the exposure time. By combining aperture size and shutter speed, you can balance composition factors like light trails and motion in the photo with uniquely digital concerns like digital noise.
So grab your camera some spring evening and try your hand at a nightscape masterpiece!
Dave's Favorites: Uncover Your Hidden Masterpiece With PaintedSnapshot.com
What do you do with those digital photos that just didn't turn out the way you expected? Overexposed, underexposed, poorly framed... there's a million reasons why you might toss images in the Windows Recycle Bin. PaintedSnapshot.com offers a truly unique service that might be able to give photos like that a whole new lease on life.
Artist Tom Vilot takes digital photos and reinterprets them as handcrafted digital paintings that are simply stunning. Vilot doesn't just run a few artsy Photoshop filters on your images--anyone can do that. Instead, he creates a new image entirely by hand, using the original as a guide. The final image is printed with archival-quality paper and ink, and should last for 50 years or more (about what you'd expect from a traditional photo print).
A PaintedSnapshot.com prints isn't cheap--the cost is $120, plus shipping. It looks like a memorable gift, though. Be sure to visit the Web site and compare the before-and-after shots of the sample images.
Q&A: How Many Pixels Do I Need to Print?
I have a digital camera that captures "3.1 million effective pixels" with a resolution of 2048 by 1536 recorded pixels per inch. I also have a Lexmark Z52 printer that has a resolution of 2400 by 1200 dots per inch. The largest picture that I want to print will be 8 by 10 inches. Here's my problem: finding some correlation between ppi and dpi. There must be some setting that will allow me to set my camera and not waste camera storage area by setting it to too many pixels, while sending just the right number of pixels to my printer. What should I do?
--Roy Rezeski, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Ignore those printer resolution specs, Roy: Personally, I don't trust them. There's more wacky accounting in printer specifications than there was in the books at Enron. As a rule of thumb, you want to send between 200 and 300 pixels per inch to your ink jet printer. For most ink jet printers, 200 ppi is fine, but you should experiment with your Lexmark to see if a 250 or 300 ppi image looks any better than a 200 ppi version.
In plain English, use this guide: If you want to print an image at 8 by 10 inches, make sure your digital image measures around 1600 by 2000 pixels.
Hot Pic of the Week
Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.
Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.
This week's Hot Pic: "The Moon," by Tom Luker, Peterborough, Ontario
Tom's astrophotography is very much a home-made affair. He built his own telescope adapter for a Sony DSC-P1 digital camera. He says: "The ring fits around the eye piece of the scope and tightens slightly, just enough to secure it. I use a nylon bushing to give it some grip and to protect the eye piece. The bolt goes into the camera's tripod mount, and the hole is adjustable for several different telescope eyepieces. I have been doing this for about six months now."
We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.
For back issues, visit our Digital Photo Tips archive. Sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.