Photography at night: How do you manage?

All of my nighttime shots are kinda yellow, from the lighting, which I usually photoshop out, but I was never all that good with photography anyways, haha.

 

The biggest things I would recommend for low lighting photography are just making sure you know how to change your camera's ISO setting (to control how much light your camera is taking in) and white balance setting (to help counteract that yellow tinge indoor lighting likes to give photos). Shoot in the widest aperture you can get with your lens to take in as much light as possible in dim settings. You could also invest in a tripod to help avoid blurring pictures with long exposures - I use mine sparingly because it feels weird to me to not be able to angle my camera the way I want, but it helps cut down on the need to crank up the ISO (which can add noise to your photos).

You could also look up some lighting tutorials if you think that would help - you don't necessarily need super expensive lights, just a sense of where to put them. And good old fashioned white foam board makes a really good freestanding reflector when it's angled right.

Hope that helps!

 

I do ALL my photos at night, as that is when I have the sitting room to myself (the only area large enough in my tiny flat to set things up).

Amet has some sound tips there. I am also putting together a tut on basic kit atm. It is easy and cheap to do tabletop photography, so no reason not to.

 

I'm still working out the best way to get my setup "right" (I'll be waiting for that kit tutorial!), but what I've been doing here is shutting off all my regular house lights, and using only a set of separate lamps with daylight spectrum bulbs (with my camera adjusted to match the spectrum), and a little tweaking in Photoshop afterward to tune up the colors.

 

I likewise take almost all my pics inside in a tiny flat with artificial lighting... As well as the helpful tips here, there are some great tutorials in this photo thread! I bought several cheap tripods, and have ended up using a gorillapod- type one the most, as being very flexible for getting different angles easily (but I do have a lightweight camera not a biiiig SLR)... I also got a remote to use with the camera - cost a few pounds to get a generic one on the internet, and really helpful to be able to play with lighting, poses etc and take pics without having to touch the camera. Re lighting, I have a basic softbox, and two small lamps - and Photoshop Elements to adjust lighting and colour etc afterwards... Most recently, I've got a couple of printed backdrops to vary the 'scenery' a bit... Hope that's some help - and good luck!

 

The first thing you normally want to do when setting up an indoor photo studio is block all incoming light, so that you are in total control of the lighting. Because of this, all indoor studio lighting techniques are applicable to doing photography at home at night. Controlling indoor lighting during the day is actually a much bigger challenge, so you've lucked out there :-)

Indoor photography can be done with or without a tripod, depending on your camera, lenses and lighting apparatus, and the type of shot you're trying to obtain. Whether or not you can handhold indoors is a matter of whether or not you have enough lighting to get proper exposure with a hand-holdable shutter speed, at the aperture you need for the look you're after. Same rules as outdoors. In practice, it is much, much easier to achieve this with flashes/strobes than with continuous 'hot' lighting. The reason a lot of people use tripods indoors is because they are using continuous lighting from things like desklamps fit with floodlight bulbs. These are orders of magnitude less bright than the sun, so the result is long exposure times requiring a tripod to avoid using high, noisy ISO settings. This is not usually an issue when shooting with flash, you can almost always shoot at your camera's sync speed (typically 1/180-1/250) and adjust the flash power to get the exposure right. With full size human subjects this often requires some big studio strobes, but at doll scale any camera-mounted flashes are more than powerful enough. Doubly true if you have lens that is either fast, or has image stabilization.

Flash photography with off-camera hot-shoe type flashes requires more trial and error experimentation than using continuous lights, because you don't see the results as you move them around, but you can put your flashes on light stands with continuous "modeling" lights that you turn off after you get the lights positioned, or you can swap them out--most light stands have a standard 5/8" stud on the top that you can get both hot shoe brackets and regular lighting attachments for (ones that look like desk lamp reflectors and take a standard screw-in bulb). All of this stuff is pretty cheap too, you'd be looking at about $20 per stand, another $10 per flash bracket, and then the cost of the flashes and their attachment connections to the camera--some cameras and flashes work together wirelessly, others will need cords running to them from the top of the camera. Flashes are available for all budgets, ranging from good, cheap Yongnuo units that start at about $60 each, to high-end brand name Canon and Nikon flashes that cost 10 times this. You don't need much power to shoot dolls, because you can put the flashes quite close to the scene, as the subjects are small.

The benefits to using flash are that you have [more than] enough light intensity to shoot handheld, and you aren't lighting up your place continuously like a supermarket, and you will have consistent color temperature (best to use matched units, btw).

If you want to start with continuous lighting, you will almost certainly need a tripod. A good tripod is unfortunately not ever cheap, and cheap ones are likely to cause only frustration. What you want are stability, good dampening of vibration and no drift when tightening things up. If you're trying out a tripod, bring your camera to the store, mount it, and look through it in live view or video mode with the view magnified. When you adjust the camera and let go, if the view takes a long time to stop vibrating, this is not a good tripod. If the framing changes as you "lock it down" after adjusting, this is also not the sign of a good tripod. These things will cause never ending frustration. If you don't want to do a boat load of research, you can increase your chances of getting a decent tripod by going with a trustworthy brand. Walking into a store like Best Buy, Manfrotto is probably the only brand that you'll find that makes a respectable tripod. You'll see travel tripods from Slik, Vivitar, Sunpak, etc... you don't want those. This is one area where it makes no sense to start cheap and upgrade later, because the cheap options just don't work properly.

Make sure you also get a ball head on your tripod, not a tilt and pan head intended for video. Tilt and pan heads make it a lot more difficult to adjust your camera angle for stills, they are designed for the 2-axes of movement that you want when doing video.

A huge time saver when using a tripod is a remote (infrared remote shutter release). You can get these in Best Buy for Nikon, Canon and possibly other brands of camera, and they are like $15-$20. When you're taking multiple shots using a tripod, it allows you to fire them off quickly without having to touch the camera itself, which could start it oscillating. Without the remote, it's best to use the camera's built-in timer to take shots (and mirror lockup if your camera can do it), and this of course makes the whole process take longer. Remotes are cheap and a huge time saver.

Perhaps the best part about shooting with flash, is that you can go nuts with making dirt-cheap lighting modifiers. Put a sock over the flash. Bounce it of some foam core. Shoot the flash through a sheet of white paper. Build a cardboard and fabric remnant softbox. The possibilities are endless and you can get professional studio looking results with just a few bucks and some time invested in constructing your modifiers.

 

I use a very very bright daylight bulb I got at the hardware store, with its own little clamp to attach to my single photo tripod, or an art easel I sometimes commandeer for this purpose. A sheet of translucent plastic is my light diffuser for softer effects, or I might use a sheet of gauzy material.


Looks like a bedroom scene near an open window in the afternoon, doesn't it? NOPE. Sometime around 10pm.

 

If your camera has a bulb setting or long shutter times available, then you might try light painting with a flashlight. In a dark room with an open shutter move the flashlight around the object. This can give you very interesting photos. If you can't get a tripod quick, you can use a stack of books to get started. Just set the camera on the books and if possible use the self timer on the camera or a remote shutter release. I have done this before and it worked out great. Another thing that might be worth trying is stacking photos in software. There are also free photo applications that will give you editing options that rival the expensive packages. If you have a Canon, there is the option of CHDK. That will allow you to get raw images out of a point and shoot. CHDK also allows for use of a USB cable triggered shutter.

 

in my country the sun is mostly bright so i have a so good lighting in day time ..m but when night come i use some lamp and i have a flash which i attach it to my cam so i get i better lighting ^^

 

Everyone here has some wonderful advice.

When I photograph my dolls indoors, and often at night, I use a homemade lightbox. I made a sort of mini tutorial on how to make one, along with a Youtube video I used for reference, in this link: http://www.denofangels.com/forums/showthread.php/681821-Building-a-lightbox!
It's worked out really great, so far!

I'd also recommend investing in some photo editing software, which can adjust the lighting and shadowing in pictures.

 

Thanks for all the tips - this is a great thread! I recently picked up a Verilux "productivity lamp" from Bed, Bath and Beyond that uses a "natural spectrum daylight" bulb. It is awesome for shooting dollies and it has a flexible neck so I can angle it however I need. It's a easy solution for me, especially since I am not really a photographer. I just like grabbing some pics every once in a while

 

Usually, I use a good manual camera (where I can set exposure, aperture, etc) and a solid tripod :O

Even in darker rooms, if the exposure is set long enough, I get "luminous" photos that are like... much brighter than the room actually looks. So if my ISO is set to medium (so somewhere around 400 in a dimly-lit room), and my shutter speed is sloooow (like 1/2), I fiddle with the exposure til the photos get brighter. the tripod ensures that everything stays sharp even if the photo takes a while to snap.

I have a newer smartphone with photography options like these available in advanced settings and I can get about the same "luminous photo". It actually does look a bit glowy, but with the right tripod or the steadiest hand imaginable, you get sharp lines along with an airy feel ;u;

 

I wish I had a camera that could handle night photos. nighttime is my fav time for dolls x3