Digital Focus: Take Photos at Night

Learn the secrets of night photography and how to print a contact sheet.

Dave Johnson

Secrets of Night Photography

Night photography is one of my favorite pastimes. Give me a camera and a free evening, and you're likely to find me downtown photographing city lights. But for a long time, night photography was also a good barometer of just how far digital cameras lagged behind old-fashioned film cameras. My first few digital cameras were virtually useless for night shots. Early cameras freaked out when you left the shutter open too long, and the result was all sorts of digital noise that made your night pictures unusable.

We've come a long way in the last few years, though. While cameras certainly vary, I've found that recently models do a dramatically better job with long exposures than the first few generations of digital cameras. So unless you bought your digital camera back when Pauly Shore was still somewhat popular at the box office, you can take some fun, creative, and unusual long-exposure night photos.

Set Exposure on Long

The heart and soul of night photography is the long exposure. When you take a picture at night, you'll usually measure your exposure in seconds, and that means a tripod is a must.

To avoid jostling the camera at the moment you start the exposure, I also suggest using the camera's self-timer. That way, you're not touching the camera at the moment the exposure starts. An even better solution is to use a remote trigger. Many digital cameras come with credit-card-size infrared remote controls, and they're ideal for starting an exposure without jiggling the camera.

Bracket Your Exposures

You'll find that night photography is addictive, because there's no such thing as a single correct exposure--it's all very subjective, and you're the boss. Consider this: When you shoot a picture in ordinary daylight, if you over- or underexpose your picture by very much, it's obviously "wrong." At night, though, you can take the same scene with two radically different exposures, and both may be perfectly acceptable. It's all a matter of how much light you want to let into the scene.

Try a simple cityscape, for instance. Take your camera outside and point it at a building that has some illuminated windows. Shoot the picture twice--first with a one-second exposure, and again with a four-second exposure. Switch the camera to playback mode and compare the photos in the digital display. You should see that the longer exposure made the lights bigger and brighter, and gave the walls of the building more illumination from ambient lighting. Here are vivid examples of the effect of a shorter and a longer exposure.

Capture Motion

Now for the fun part: Long exposures allow you to break away from freezing reality, and instead capture motion in your photos. Point the camera at a busy street and set the exposure for eight seconds. You should get a picture with long, multicolored trails of lights as car headlights move through the scene. Cool? I think so. You can get a million variations by tweaking the composition of the scene and the length of the exposure.

Tweaking the Aperture

So far, we've only messed with the shutter speed. What about the aperture? It can play an important role, too. A wide-open aperture, of course, can reduce the exposure time needed to get a picture. If you want to leave the shutter open for a very long time--say, 30 seconds to get long light trails--it's a good idea to shoot with a small aperture so you don't overexpose any stationary light sources in your scene. If you want to avoid motion in your scene, though, go for a short shutter speed and a big aperture.

Get Flashy

I've got one last trick for you. Suppose you want to freeze a picture of someone in the foreground while capturing motion trails of car lights in the background. You don't have to make your model stand motionless for 30 seconds. Even if you did, your subject would still be underexposed, because there isn't enough ambient light in the area to properly illuminate the person.

Instead, bring along an external flash unit from your old 35mm camera. Position your subject in the foreground, and start exposing the picture. Flash your subject manually, and have him or her continue to stand in place until the exposure ends. Once you get the hang of it, you can submit your best shot for next week's Hot Pic of the Week contest.

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Dave's Favorites: Webshots Desktop

Don't you just love it when you find a program that solves problems you didn't even realize you had? The Webshots Desktop is one such application.

This 1.5MB download would be worth getting even if it cost a few dollars, especially if you're starting to get bored with the bland blue Windows desktop and would prefer to watch digital images on your PC screen.

The Webshots Desktop doesn't let your desktop get stale; it changes your wallpaper daily, hourly, or as often as you deem appropriate. You can tell Webshots where to find all of your own digital images, or use the program's Internet conduit to download other folks' pictures from a huge online library.

That's neat, but it also has an optional screensaver mode--you can direct Webshots to show all those same digital images as an automated slideshow whenever your PC has been inactive for a little while.

Webshots doesn't cure cancer or balance your checkbook, but it's a great little program that keeps your PC fresh and interesting with your favorite images.

Q&A: Printing a Contact Sheet

My boss takes pictures of a job site and downloads them to the office computer. From there, we would like to use a software package to print all of the pictures on a single page, along with titles (the titles would be the file names). It would be nice if the software also did touch-ups, but that's not absolutely necessary. Do you have a suggestion?

-- Steven Whited, Raleigh, North Carolina

I've got just the thing for you. My favorite inexpensive image editor, Paint Shop Pro 7, available for about $90, does exactly what you need. Get a trial version or buy a copy.

Start Paint Shop Pro and choose Browse from the File menu. The Browse window will appear and show you image thumbnails by folder. Surf to the folder you want to print and then choose Print from the File menu. You'll get a "contact sheet" of the images in the folder, along with all of the file names. It's a handy feature that most people don't even know is there.

Send your questions to question@bydavejohnson.com, and please be sure to let me know where you're from.

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 $10 and $100.

A gentle reminder, folks: We're disqualifying some really wonderful pictures every week because the submissions aren't following the rules. Be sure to include everything we ask for in the e-mail message, including a description of your picture and your complete contact information, or your entry is wasted!

Here's how to enter:

Send us your photograph in JPG format at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels to hotpic@pcworld.com. Entries at higher resolutions will be disqualified immediately. Include the title of your photo along with a short description of the photo and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address, or your entry will not be considered. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regs.

This Week's Hot Pic:

Beach Boys, by Jason Luong, San Francisco, California

Jason says:

"This was taken at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The wetsuit is not just for show; it is needed because the water is always cold, even on a hot day."