Concours photo : Regards Croisés

Here are some helpful tips to improve your night photographs.

Shoot During Dusk
Best night photos are taken during dusk.
Taking pictures during dusk will show more colors and details in the distance.

High ISO required
Using a high ISO is required. You can reduce noise with image editing software but you can’t remove blur.

Keep it Steady
Taking photos at night requires slow shutter speed.
To shoot bright pictures without the blur at night, use a tripod.
In addition to using a tripod, use the self timer mode.
If you don’t have a tripod with you, find some support objects to keep your body and arms stable. For example, tash can, tables, chair, or simply on the floor.

Freeze your Friends
When taking photos of your friends at night, combine flash with a long exposure. The flash will freeze the foreground and the long exposure will reveal the background. Because people tend to move right after they see the flash, set the shutter curtain sync to the second curtain (Usually in the custom functions settings). This will fire a flash just before the shutter closes instead of in the beginning. Using second curtain sync will also put your friends in front of any motion blur so nothing is covering their faces. Second curtain sync is available in most new digital SLR cameras but rarely seen in point and shoot cameras.

Shoot for High Dynamic Range (HDR)
Place your camera on a tripod and shoot three exposures: one darker, one lighter, and one just in the middle. Your camera may have auto exposure bracketing to help you with this. Load the images into Photoshop and create HDR file out of the three exposures. Now you have a HDR image that you can apply tone mapping to to reveal more details. Tone mapped night photos can give results similar to shooting during twilight with more post-processing control.

Shoot Several and Stack
Sometimes when you shoot long exposures, noise and hot pixels will appear even at the lowest ISO setting. To overcome this problem, shoot the same photo a few times (more is better), and use Photoshop CS3 image stacking to combine the analyze the image to remove noise and hot pixels.
1. Start Photoshop CS3.
2. Open the File> Scripts menu and choose Load files into Stack
3. Click the Browse button and load all the images.
4. Checkmark the « Create Smart Object after Loading Layers » and click OK.
5. Open the Layers> Smart Objects> Stack Mode menu and choose Median.

Tags: High Dynamic Range, High ISO, How to, improve, night photographs, Shoot During Dusk