howto – why I love night photography, and why you should too (part iv)

 
hey friends ! After the long period of posting the only on film has taken photographs series, I feel that I have to return back to one of my favorite kind of photography – low light condition photography or in other words – night photography. “in my previous posts” I said everything about the reasons of this interest (even the real love should have no reasons), so today I would like to talk about “how to” – how to shoot in deep darkness with only spots of a weak light.

As usual, I use fast lenses for my night walks. mostly it’s Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens or Canon 50mm with the same max available aperture. some time ago my only set for this kind of shots was f/1.4, ISO 1600 or 3200 and auto shutter speed. but once, when I walked with Ricoh GR1s with ISO 400 film, I took a few night scenes with built it an f/2.8 lens of this camera and got very interesting results which changed my main configuration. I decided to change aperture priority to shutter speed priority and to forget about f/1.4 because with less fast shutter I can use lower than 1.4 aperture and have longer hyperfocal distance. plus I found that for better results I have to compensate an exposure to around one stop with the goal to bring more light to my frames. of course, I understand that for every specific camera and taste this may be different and may be detected only with experiments. the shutter speed I use for my night walks is around 1/30-125, very occasionally faster but mainly in this window of speed. I don’t look for the perfect frozen moving objects – I choose the speed of my camera shutter by my vision how long and blurred the trace of this object I would like to get.

enjoy the low light and ask me if you need some help…
 
 
 these two images after which I changed my night photography camera set – taken on Film with Ricoh GR1s
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 F-stop 1.8, shutter 1/125, compensation +0.5, focal length 35mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 

 
 F-stop 2, shutter 1/125, compensation 0, focal length 35mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 

 
 F-stop 2, shutter 1/45, compensation +0.5, focal length 35mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 

 
 F-stop 2, shutter 1/60, compensation +0.5, focal length 50mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 

 
 F-stop 3.5, shutter 1/45, compensation +0, focal length 50mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 

 
 F-stop 2, shutter 1/125, compensation -0.5, focal length 50mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 
 
 
 F-stop 2.8, shutter 1/60, compensation +1, focal length 50mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 
 
 
 F-stop 2.8, shutter 1/180, compensation +0.5, focal length 50mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 
 
 
 F-stop 1.4, shutter 1/125, compensation +0.5, focal length 50mm, ISO3200
 
 
 
 
 
 
 the only image in this series when i used manual settings and Asahi 50mm lens F-stop 1.4, shutter 1/500,
  compensation 0, focal length 50mm, ISO800