Night photography camera settings

Stepping out at night and shooting a night full of different colors and lights can be quite challenging than it looks. Here are a few tips for the camera settings to help you out.

1. Shutter priority

   

   You need to set your camera in shutter priority mode. Then set the camera to lowest possible shutter speed as possible, this will allow the camera to adjust the ISO setting thus allowing sufficient light to enter through it.

2. Wide aperture

   

   You need a great amount of light to enter through your camera, thus you need to set your lens on a wide aperture. A good prime lens (24mm or 35 mm) is best suitable for such a task.




3. Higher ISO

   You also need to set camera on a very high ISO level, more than normal, to make it more sensitive to light. During day time you can keep ISO level at 1500-1600 but during night it has to be at 3000-3200.

4. Shoot in RAW

   

   During night its more advisable to shoot in RAW mode, shooting in raw mode gives you complete control over the quality of the image. RAW files have a color dept of 16 bits thus providing a very good post processing opportunitues.

5. Focus mode

   If your lens has automatic focus, its better to use single auto-focus mode rather than continuous focus, which maintains a constant focus through out and we dont require that. Once foccused we can switch to manual mode.

6. Keep camera stirdy

   

   Always keep your camera fixed while taking a shot, if its not possible to carry tripod keep it on a firm surface like rock or some other support, so you don’t land up a shacky image.

7. No need for image stabilization

   If you are using a support to take shots you should switch off the automatic image stabilization, since this will reduce the quality of the image.