Shooting photography at night has more challenges than just a lack of strong lighting. In fact, the lighting can be a bigger problem then you think sometimes.
When setting your white balance during the day you really only need consider a few options and then stick with it: Daylight, Cloudy, or Shade. But at night you have a new obstacle thrown into the equation: mixed lighting.
Now for those still using auto-white balance you have probably come across this and wondered what happened. Fortunately there is a simple technique for everyone using auto-white balance to make sure you never have a problem again. Hold out your left hand, palm down, about a foot above the keyboard. Now, with your right hand, smack the back of your left hand repeatedly until the urge to use auto-white balance goes away. It's s great technique!
The problem with shooting at night is you may have a halogen street lamp, incandescent lighting, and fluorescent bulbs all in the same frame. What then? There are many tricks but the simplest is to make the photo a B&W.
Black and white photography is nice for many reasons. It focuses more on textures and patterns since it has a lack of colors. Those textures and patterns are actually what make the photo. And at night they can become more interesting. It gives you something to strive for, so if you haven't tried it yet give it a go!
This shot was tricky because the university is in the middle of a five year program to replace all incandescent bulbs with newer, energy efficient halogen bulbs. The problem? No matter how I set my white balance one bulb would be orange and the other blue. The easy solution? No color at all.
The challenge with this photo was guessing my camera settings knowing that canon was gonna fire in the dark. Being as awesome as I am, I nailed it!
Until this thread I'd never realised I've never shot a b'nw night scene - I must've been nodding off at the time. It's certainly worth giving it a bash sometime :)
You are so right, mixed lighting drives me crazy at night and B&W solves the problem so beautifully. Here are two shots from last night that looked super-boring in colour but came alive in B&W:
I did some totally experimental shots last night - experimentating with long exposures and small apertures and monochrome and such and so on.
It's a fair bit jumbled of a subject - I meant to bring the RAW file with me to work on today, but instead, I accidentally grabbed the jpeg. Alas. I worked on that a little here. It's not a total betty, but a vast improvement.
I believe this was a 30 second exposure. I know that my fracking fingers were frozen by the end of this whole adventure. :)
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The challenge with this photo was guessing my camera settings knowing that canon was gonna fire in the dark. Being as awesome as I am, I nailed it!
This one was pretty in colour, but I just wanted to give it another look :-)
Taken in the garden while there was almost no light anymore
But I also got one real b&w night shot (it's the only one - I definitely have to try more of that!), which I took for the fear theme:
It's a fair bit jumbled of a subject - I meant to bring the RAW file with me to work on today, but instead, I accidentally grabbed the jpeg. Alas. I worked on that a little here. It's not a total betty, but a vast improvement.
I believe this was a 30 second exposure. I know that my fracking fingers were frozen by the end of this whole adventure. :)
I think this one was 30 seconds too...
The piece de resistance! I am actually really proud of this shot, so much so that it is framed and hanging up in my home.