Making the most of night photography.

Nighttime photography settings are a good place to begin: opening up your aperture, slowing down your shutter speed or (controversially) fiddling with your ISO (the sensitivity of your digital camera — comparable to film speed in a film camera). But you can also look for ways to adjust the light on your subject. That could mean adding a flash or a fill light or just asking your subject to step forward into the glow of a streetlamp. Each of these has its own set of constraints, requiring either good planning or a little luck (if you want that tree branch to move out of your light, you’ll need a length of rope or a very steady wind). You’ll never get the control afforded by daytime photography settings, so when you’re aiming to take great night shots, make sure that you give yourself time to experiment.

Anthony Pidgeon, a veteran of low-light and nighttime shoots, suggests starting with a few test shots to establish the optimal shutter speed and find the right white balance: “Because it’s dark, the image will take longer to register on the sensor or the film. That means your shutter speed has to be slower just to get the shot. You need to get a baseline exposure that shows you what you’re getting with the ambient light. Then find out how far you can go without blowing out the highlights. ‘This cool neon sign — if I overexpose it, it will go out to white instead of this cool red or green.’ You work with that until you get your baseline.”

Find your light.

Alex Str, a photographer and art director, says that night photography is the best environment to work in because unlike with daytime shoots the light’s “not changing — it’s very much the same throughout the night. And so you have a lot of room to experiment; you can keep trying things until you feel like you got it right without worrying about the light changing. During the day, when you’re outside, the sun is constantly changing.”

“You can keep trying things until you feel like you got it right without worrying about the light changing.”

That consistency gives you time to play — even though you’ll need slow shutter speeds and a wide aperture — you have an evenly lit backdrop to experiment in.

Pidgeon recommends a few different ways to explore light in nighttime street photography. He notes that, “a lot of times you want to use light to define the shape of things or the scale of things. So if you’ve got light on one part of the building and it just bleeds off so you can’t tell where the building ends and the night sky begins, that doesn’t look so great. Find a way to pop in a little something on the corner of that building, so that you’re defining the edge. That can be enough to create interest. Sometimes it can be as simple as waiting for a car to go by and shine its headlights for a second; that just gives you that little edge. It’s a different frame of mind because you really have to think about the composition. You have to add things in, because you have less to work with.”