Low light can bring a great atmosphere to any photo. However, low light needs a tripod and patience if you are to capture the subjects at their best. A tripod because you are going to be taking long exposure photographs and without it there will be movement. The slightest movement will lead to blur. Patience because those long exposures may mean people and pets keep popping into frame at the wrong moment spoiling the perfect shot.
Low light occasions easily present themselves at dusk and dawn and indoors. I am going to a local church to capture some of the atmosphere.
What equipment?
As I said, low light needs a tripod and patience. I have a small Rollei tripod. Some will say I am a bit short of patience but we’ll make do. Traveling light means I will take my Canon and 50mm objective. Why not a zoom you may ask? Really, I choose my 50mm because it has has a large f/1.8 aperture so it can let what little light there is into the camera body. It’s also a great objective for capturing a variety of subjects.
Making sure there was nothing else was happening in the church, and that we had permission, I was allocated 2 hours with the objective of 10 or so images.
The process
Initially take a slow walk around the building looking at everything. Focus on the lighting and shadows. You might not be able to get high up, check out where any choir or organ is situated. But certainly low down angles can give interesting images. If you have seen some of my photos of trees you will know I like looking up, for example. Contrasting shades and colours are good subjects. This can come from lights, or even better the sun. I was fortunate to have sun shining through stained glass windows which brings colour to objects which wouldn’t normally be coloured. Candles are also a source of light but the flames do move so can be tricky on long exposures or when creating an HDR, or bracketed, image.
After reviewing the site, set the ISO to 100. Why? we don’t want the camera software doing clever compensation for the lack of light and increasing the sensor sensitivity leading to noisy pictures. Although I have heard that you can reduce the noise, by merging several images. Not something I have tested yet but when I do I’ll add a link here. Because we have our tripod we can extending the exposure time to avoid any issues . Finally, set the settings to manual or AV, Aperture priority, f/1.8 and off we go.
The results
I wanted to share the images capturing the architecture, the candles and the sunlight. They show that low light needs a tripod and patience. Whether it be waiting for the visitors to move away from the seating, the walkways or the pillars. or coming back to the same chair later in the visit as the sun made its way round to add colour to plan straw chairs.
Finally, if you are out and have no equipment or just out of patience, today’s cameras can do a good job. For example the final candle above. The downside is that it’s a little noisy.
Other posts that you may like
If you are interested in lighting, I have some other photos on the lighting page.
There is also a blog post on :
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