Night Shooting

There are many ways to shoot at night - long exposure, light painting, multiple exposure, and composite stacking to name several that come to mind. Here is a barn taken around sunset, still plenty of light out. With this much light, I needed to shut a lot of it out; went with the settings f4.5, 1/80th of a second, and ISO 100.

Here is an example of light painting when it went to pitch black outside about 10pm. Light painting is a long exposure with the introduction of a separate light source. Settings were f5.6, 30 seconds, ISO 800. The following photo has the same settings just without the light exposing the barn.

This one is about a 4 minute exposure at f5.6 with ISO 100. With the longer shutter, you see the start of a star trail.

And for a quick example of a longer star trail, I went out and set the shutter speed to bulb for 25 minutes. Another way to do this with low noise (low ISO) is to shoot 30 second exposures and stack them in Photoshop.

And finally, the moon can be shot rather quickly due to its luminosity - this is 1/250th of a second at f8, ISO 100. The tight aperture, low ISO, and quick shutter allows the darkening of the sky.

Now grab your tripod, cable release, flashlight, and popcorn and shoot some night scenes - pass the popcorn, we could be out here for a while as a good light trailing could take up to 3 hours or more.