 Do you ever struggle taking photographs in dark situations? Well, there's a reason for that. It's because it really is the most difficult type of photography. And we photographers, we call this low light photography. Low light photography is a lot of fun, but it does take a little bit of time and experience to become really good at it. You're also going to need a lot of little bit better equipment or you're going to need to find ways to adjust to the equipment that you have at your disposal. So in this lesson we're going to talk a little bit about some of those different things. We're going to talk about the equipment you need or we're going to talk about some of the techniques you're going to use for holding your camera that are going to be important. I'm going to give you a few tips for it and I'm also going to give you a few examples of what low light photography is capable of. So how about we talk about that? How about we talk about what you need to know to be a good low light photographer? First of all, low light photography is going to be encountered in lots of places and mostly it's just going to be a question of darkness. So after sunset it's going to be dark or even at sunset you're going to have after the golden hour you're going to have a lot of dark. You're going to have concerts and things like that. I'm trying to spell it in German. I'm so sorry. Concerts and you're going to have dark rooms or dark houses. So a lot of dark places even in the woods or something like that. And just dark landscapes also. You're going to have lots of when you're outside doing maybe big trips in the woods or things like that or if you're out in the city at night you're going to find lots of dark places and that's all of that basically would involve if you want to take a photograph of it being a little bit capable at low light photography. Alright so what are some of the challenges then? What does all of this mean in terms of settings and things like that that you need to think about for your computer or for your camera? Well you're first of all going to have a lot of trouble freezing motion is going to be a problem. And freezing motion just means having a high enough shutter speed to freeze any action that happens in the photograph. And that is just really hard when you don't have a whole lot of light available. You're going to have color problems. Color is really hard to capture for certain cameras in low lighting situations. Metering is going to be hard. So you're going to have a little bit of difficulty figuring out what is 18% in gray like in our metering lesson. And camera shake is going to be a huge problem. So camera shake because your shutter speeds are going to be low. And what does that mean? What does a low shutter speed mean? Well if you're out there shooting let's do a little bit of math. We'll determine sort of what a low shutter speed means. When you've set up your camera and you've got your ISO and your aperture set so say we're at ISO 400 or actually erase that, let's do 800. So it's kind of a darker evening it's 800 ISO. You've opened up your lens as open as it will get so maybe we have a 3.5 f-stopped lens. Well then you have to take a look at this moment at your lens and see what zoom factor you're at. So say you've got a 35mm lens on your camera. Now that is the equivalent if you're on a digital camera that's not equivalent say it is a digital camera with a 1.5 crop factor. So it's equivalent to a 50mm lens. So if you don't know what I mean by that it's basically that if you've got a digital camera with a DX sensor it crops the photo so a 35mm lens actually creates an image that is a 50mm image essentially like it would be a 50mm image on a film camera but not on the digital camera that you have. Well basically what you do with this number then you've got this 50mm and now you just have to do a little bit of math all you have to do is put 10 over top of that 50 and this right here the result is your slowest shutter speed that you should be using for handheld. Now if you've got vibration reduction or things like that so that you'll see things called VR lenses or you'll find things that are stabilized or things like that you might be able to go up one stop so one stop in this situation would be 100th of a stop or 100th of a second so you might be able to get away with that with a VR lens. So this is your slow shutter speed once you get below this once you get below your handheld speed is when you're really hitting your slow shutter speed area for your camera and that's when you want to start thinking about special techniques for holding the camera where to set it if you need a tripod things like that. So along those lines equipment let's maybe talk a little bit about equipment over here in the bottom left things that might help you a tripod might be a good idea now if you don't have a tripod or you can't afford a tripod just find places where you can put your camera things that you can where places things you can set your camera on or brace it against. So you could for example brace your camera up against a telephone pole and hold it very steadily and maybe even wedge a finger in between the camera and the pole as sort of a stabilizer and push the button but you're trying to reduce this camera shake that's why you've got the tripod you want to cut down on your camera shake you could also think about a flashlight would be a good idea I find flashlights are great for lots of things for example for working with the camera sometimes you have buttons you might not know where they're at and it's also good for setting up and even for light painting we'll talk about light painting a little bit towards the end of the lesson also if you have an SLR you want a fast lens but you don't necessarily need one just an idea you could also have a strobe or sometimes what's called a flash in sort of common common English a strobe is just the thing that's on the top of your camera but maybe you have a separate one that you can use and I'll show you some uses for that another thing you could try is having a cable release I'm not going to write it down because it's really a little bit extra and most people don't really need it alright so that is kind of an introduction to some of the concepts here some of the things that you might need to know and some of the things that I might mention here in this lesson alright so let's just take a couple example images here we're going to start out back in Montana where I come from I took this hike with my friend Christopher and Chris is sitting here next to the fire and I am at ISO 400 I'm at F5 I'm at a 15th of a second now just a little bit later this is just really just after sunset so right here the sun's setting and right here over on the right the sun has already set and still we're at 400 and still we're at F5 but now we are at 10 seconds so that is a huge difference multiple times longer this right here is your low shutter speed situation and I did this with a tripod don't necessarily need to I could have set it on a rock I could have put it on my camera bag whatever was high enough to get the image that I wanted but you can see here that Chris didn't move during the image while I was taking the photograph luckily he was just tranced out staring into the fire and I just took a photo while he was doing that I didn't have to ask him to do that or anything like that but if he were to move the photo would be sort of different it might have I would say ruined but not necessarily but you can see here because the exposure is so long you can see the sparks coming up off the fire you can see the glow of the fire everywhere the glow of the sky the big beautiful Montana sky back there you can really kind of see everything you can see also the difference here between these two photographs I would say both of them are low light photographs but this one over here to the right is much lower and definitely is a little bit harder of an image to get you can get this image to the right with just about any camera even a really inexpensive camera but it really is going to push the limits of your camera we should talk a little bit maybe about that as we're rolling through here really good cameras have a much better sensor in terms of its capture ability to capture low light that's really what makes a sensor really a quality sensor and so when they put a sensor in a really cheap camera or in a cell phone it's often just a sensor that is pretty light sensitive but not very and when you turn up the power on that sensor and as you get up towards the higher ISO ranges that's where you really start seeing sort of the quality fall off and that's where the images start to kind of become a little bit less pretty now let's move on here and start talking about these images that I've pulled up they're both not necessarily really low light photography but they're pretty much right on the edge it's kind of the boundary of low light photography and right here I think I was shooting at about a 500 ISO which is a step between traditional ISOs that you'll find on some professional cameras I was shooting at f1.8 and I think my shutter speed was around I think it was around a 50th or so and this is just an example of sort of the moodiness that I love about about low light photography it's great and this image over here to the left is actually taken with the same f-stop and the same shutter speed but it was taken at an 800 ISO it's a little bit lower and this is one of the things about having a better camera these photos were taken both with my nicer professional camera and you can just kind of see the difference in the quality of an 800 ISO on a better camera the colors are accurate and the contrast is good and I'm also using a really nice lens which helps a little bit and over here I was using the same camera and got really nice results just because I was also able to hold my camera very carefully now that's another point you're going to want to get good photographs here you're going to really want to make sure that you're holding your camera right so you're going to want to go back and take a look at our lesson about how to hold your camera that will really give you some good tips one of the things about low light photography is that you get a lot of this kind of stuff right here this is the trouble capturing motion that I was talking about right here and even here on this image if you look up close on Deb's hand you can see that his hand is moving so you can see here I took many versions of this photograph to the left here and I ended up going with the one where he was moving the least because otherwise the image was just a little bit too blurred to really match the feeling that I kind of wanted for it so that's one thing to watch you also want to watch the noise if you look closely at these images you can see what's called digital noise or grain if you're working with a film camera the light is still there but you're going to notice a definite drop in quality as your ISO goes up you can learn more about that in our ISO lesson so let's move on here a little bit again I was talking about getting close to light sources that is always a good thing to do try to find a nice angle to your light source and just stay close to it try to get some different angles without burning yourself I think I almost actually caught my sleeve on fire taking the photo to the right here you can see I just caught there was a light coming down beaming through this wine glass and it made this cool reflection on the table kind of I don't know if you'd call it a reflection but whatever sort of went through and made this pattern on the table and I got up close on that and because it's a really bright thing I could underexpose everything else and just concentrate on that piece of light and that's another thing you're going to have to really watch your exposure in these sort of situations if you're in doubt I would underexpose and underexposing is good for digital cameras because you really kind of can pull a lot of the information back out if you're using a film camera you can't really get rid of it all so you want to try not to underexpose as much if you can but underexposure is okay for digital in a lot of ways so you can always try that you can also I would recommend getting some friends to join up and maybe even trying out some light painting light painting is a lot of fun and you can do it with lots of different things you can use a strobe like I mentioned before at the beginning you can use a flashlight so here up to the right we've used a strobe and to the left we're using a Frisbee it's like a but you can just exchange it for an LED light or a flashlight or whatever and basically all we did for these images this one for example to the left here is a it's just a 30 second exposure and we just had the people in the group right the word photo camp this was a photo camp that I was leading last year or two years ago now and we just had them right it with their hands and then they threw the Frisbee away it had an LED light on it and in that time that that light passed across through all their hands you can see that they're standing there they stood standing and the sensor captured the light as that Frisbee moved along the path of the words photo camp and so you can do this with lots of other different types of lights so I'll show you another example here in a second and this one to the right you can see that we just had someone you can see the person actually standing here fire a strobe at our friends while they were jumping up in the air and this was actually probably like I think it was maybe like a 10 second exposure but it doesn't matter because just that one moment where the flash hit them is when you actually see our friends there alright so that is a little bit of a roundup of what you can do with low light photography remember that bad weather and cloudy days and dark music clubs can be your best friend as a photographer so you want to go out and do the best you can with what equipment you've got alright you can come back and check out more lessons at alversity.org