A Beginners Guide to Night Photography

We love night photography as it adds a unique perspective to otherwise ordinary views! Shooting at night is also much harder with an iPhone, so it’s a fun way to differentiate your photos from the incredible (sometimes shockingly good) smartphones pics. Shooting night photography is more advanced, and it’s often overwhelming to know where to start! We were overwhelmed when we first started learning.

Funny enough, our first experience with night photography was in Iceland shooting the Northern Lights! Talk about a high stakes opportunity. We were in Southern Iceland and fell asleep with the heater on full blast and woke up at 2am as the room was so hot! To cool down, we opened up the front door to our hotel room and boom - the Northern Lights were painted across the entire sky!

If you don’t live somewhere with the possibility of capturing the Northern Lights, don’t worry! There are so many other beautiful things to capture at night. Here’s a few of our favorite types of night photography:

Milky way
Star trails
Cityscape (with starbursts of course!)
Lightning
Car trails
Fireworks
Reflections
Moon

Each type of night photography uses slightly different camera settings to best capture the light! As a beginners guide to night photography, we’re going to walk through some of the basics for capturing some truly unique photos!

Tripod

Most nighttime photography requires slow shutter speeds for long exposures. This allows more light to hit the sensor to capture things that may not even be visible to the human eye! Because the shutter stays open for so long, any movement of the camera will result in a blurry photo.

We highly recommend purchasing a tripod for night photography. If you want to experiment shooting at night before purchasing a tripod, you could set your camera on top of something stationary. We love our Manfrotto Befree tripod, as it is lightweight and perfect for hiking up to mountain views, yet sturdy enough to make sure we get great long exposure shots.

Manual Focus

We found focusing the camera at night to be one of the most challenging parts about shooting at night. Because it’s dark outside, the normal camera autofocus (AF) usually does not work. This means you need to switch over to manual focus (MF) mode. Most cameras and lens setups have a lens ring which you can slide forward or backwards to turn the camera into manual focus mode.

One of our favorite tricks for manually focusing at night (and during the day) is assigning a function button on the camera which digitally zooms (sometimes called ‘magnify’) to what is in the frame of the green defining box (see photos below). By digitally zooming to your subject, it helps to fine tune the manual focus of the camera to make sure the shot is in focus.

For shooting the stars and the milky way, the manual focus should be set to infinity! On the lens, there should be a small infinity symbol which is a great starting point. To make sure the stars are truly in focus, we find the brightest star or planet, and digitally zoom in to fine tune the manual focus. Ideally, the star or planet should look like a perfect pinpoint dot meaning you’re set to the true infinity!

To ensure stability of the camera during the photo, we also use a delayed 2 second shutter so that our finger pressing the shutter button does not move the camera during the shot.

Aperture

For most night photography, you want to let as much light into the camera as possible! The aperture setting is essentially how big the hole is for light to enter the sensor of the camera. The lower the aperture, like f/1.8, the bigger the hole and the more light can enter the sensor. The higher the aperture, like f/18, the smaller the hole and less light enters the camera.

For night sky photography, you will want to let as much light as possible into the sensor, so we usually use a lens that goes down to at least f/2.8. Keep in mind, lenses that have lower apertures are usually more expensive!

For cityscape photography, most photographers aim to capture starbursts which look like radiating light from the main light sources! This is due to a phenomenon called diffraction which divides a single light into multiple rays of light. The number of rays of light is dependent on the aperture setting, and starbursts are most pronounced at higher aperture settings. Try playing around with f/16-f/22 to see the differences in the starbursts!

Keep in mind that high aperture (f/18) = a smaller hole = less light can enter the sensor = the shutter speed will need to be slower to allow more light in = the camera will need to be stable = you should invest in a tripod :)

When setting up for night photography, we usually start with our cameras in “aperture priority” mode since we have an idea of what aperture we’d like to shoot at. This helps us to find the appropriate shutter speed to get the right amount of light!

Shutter Speed

This is where the fun begins! Most daytime photos are shot with the shutter open for MUCH less than one second (like 1/400th of a second!). Capturing photos at night requires the shutter speed to be much slower - anywhere from 2 seconds to 60+ seconds!

When the shutter stays open longer, any moving light source will look like a trail of light. This is our favorite part about night photography as it’s truly like painting with light! This could be a 30 second exposure as cars drive past making streaks of the taillights, or it could be 2 hours to capture the star trails rotating around the earth!

For any body of water, the longer shutter speed smooths out the water as the waves blend together into the single image. This can make for some very beautiful reflections!

When shooting the Milky Way, if the shutter speed is too slow, you will see the slight movement of the stars making the photo seem out of focus! Our general rule of thumb for the Milky Way is less than 25 seconds.

ISO

We always refer to ISO as the dark horse of camera settings! It’s powerful, yet if used incorrectly can really mess up our photos. The ISO sets how sensitive the camera is to light sources. The higher the ISO, the more light the sensor will capture. On the flipside, the higher the ISO, the more noisy and grainy the photo will be.

Normally, we shoot at a very low ISO, like ISO-200, to make sure our photos are as crisp as possible. However, for night photography the ISO is our best friend as it allows more light sensitivity to capture more light without requiring a longer shutter speed.

ISO becomes incredibly useful for night sky photography! For example, with the Milky Way, we know we want our aperture to be set as low as possible, f/2.8, yet we don’t want our shutter speed to be longer than 24 seconds or the star movement will make the photo look blurry. If we were to shoot at f/2.8, 24 seconds, and ISO-200, the photo would be completely black! However, if we bump the ISO up to ISO-800, ISO-1600, or ISO- 3200, the extra light sensitivity will make for a beautiful Milky Way photo. Check out the examples below taken of the Milky Way off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina taken sequentially with gradually decreasing ISO.