Difficulty shooting at night, any tips??

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DGN1984

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Hi everyone,

Last night I tried to take a picture in my garden and had a few difficulties which I'm struggling to understand. I was shooting with a Canon 450d and a 50mm 1:8 prime. I was photographing the tops of some trees that were almost silhoutte like against a medium/dark blue sky (around 9pm) with a bright moon in the background.

I couldn't seem to achieve focus in automatic or manual, why is this?

Also I shot in AV, opened up the aperture to 1:8 and the shutter speed was too slow to handhold so I changed to shutter priority and shot at 1/60 thinking that if I boosted the ISO this would do the trick but the photo's were still way too dark. I know that using a tripod would have solved this but surely you can photograph at night handheld???

Lastly should I have used the flash and what effect would this have had, I wanted to capture the scene as I was seeing it and didn't know if the flash would give an obvious artificial light aspect to the picture.

I have found this forum so helpful and any feedback would be really appreciated

Thanks in advance

Cheers

Danny
 
Essentially the problem here is that not enough light is coming in.

Ways around this:

Use a tripod and a long exposure, eg put it back on AV and set whatever aperture you want and let the camera take a long exposure

Increase the amount of light the camera has to play with, possibly with flash but from the sounds of it that won't help what you're trying to achieve.

Ramp the ISO right up to 1600, open the aperture to f1.8 on AV and hold very still and hope there is enough light about.

Regarding focus the camera will focus with the aperature wide open before stopping it down to take the photo at whatever you set, if there isn't enough light to take a well exposed photo there might not be enough for the camera to autofocus. Options here are to manual focus, or a cheating way around, say your silhouette is 50 foot away, aim the camera at something illuminated 50 feet away and let the AF focus on that, keep the shutter button half pressed and recompose the shot looking at your silhouette. It's not massively accurate but might help you.
 
I assume you have the mkII (plastic mount) well its a nice lens BUT it cant focus for **** in low light situation. Flip the switch to manual, turn on live view, zoom to 10x and focus manually, your focus will probably be better than the auto focus on a bright well lit scene.

Also if you are shooting trees and the exposure is over a few seconds remember that the tops may be moving even in hardly any wind and that will blur them and make it look like focus was off.
 
DGN1984 said:
I know that using a tripod would have solved this but surely you can photograph at night handheld???
Click to expand...

90% of the time, no [unless you're looking for motion blur in the final result].

If you're on a brightly lit city centre street it's possibly EV 10 or 11 and you stand a decent chance if you can ramp up the ISO and have a fast enough lens.

In your garden at night under full moonlight, however, it's probably -3 EV. At f/2, you're looking at a 30 second exposure at ISO 100.

Your 450D only goes to ISO 1600, so at the fastest it will go, you're going to have to stand still for 2 seconds.

Bump the ISO up to 25600 (which you can get to with the 5DII) and it's still 1/8 second that you have to hold yourself steady with a 50mm lens, which is pushing your luck.
 
DGN1984 said:
... with a bright moon in the background ... surely you can photograph at night handheld???
Click to expand...
Quite simply, NO.

The light from the full moon is roughly 1/1,000,000th (one millionth!) of the light from the sun. It doesn't look that way to us because our eyes do an amazing job of coping with the variations in light levels, but it's true all the same.

So if you had a shot with tpyical settings which would need an exposure of 1/1000th in sunlight, it would need 1000 seconds (over 15 minutes) in moonlight. I can't hand-hold for 15 minutes.

One way to approach this subject is to use the Sunny-16 rule and modify it for moonlight instead of sunlight. Sunny 16 says that, on a sunny day, the exposure time at f/16 is the reciprocal of your ISO setting - so 1/100th at ISO 100, etc. Obviously in moonlight the expsoure is 1,000,000 times longer.

Your camera goes up to ISO 1600 and your lens opens up to f/1.8. ISO 1600 is 16 times faster than ISO 100, and f/1.8 is 80 times faster than f/16. So in sunlight your exposure at ISO 1600 and f/1.8 would be 1/128,000. In moonlight it would be a million times slower which is about 8 seconds.

Trade in your 450D and 50mm f/1.8 for a new 600D and 50mm f/1.4, and your moonlight exposure at ISO 12,800 and f/1.4 would be about half a second. That's still not hand-holdable, but it's getting a bit closer.

With a Nikon D3 at ISO 100,000 and a 24mm f/1.4 lens you could hand-hold in moonlight, but only just, and only if the moon is full in a clear sky.
 
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For the shot you were trying to acheive, as other's have said a tripod is a must.

I think I'd have approached the shot by setting the aperture to F8 (or maybe up to F11), ISO100 and focused on the moon (so you've pretty much focused to infinity) and then taken a series of shots with varying shutter times to try and get a balance of the blue/dark sky and the moon.

Seeing as the trees are in silhoutte, you're not really going to see if they're not completely in focus.

Could even be worth trying bracketed exposures and combining the images in PP?
 
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