Low light C&C

[Neiby]

I made my first two attempts at low light photography tonight. I was having trouble focusing, though. I'm going to have to find ways to focus better in the dark. Here's what I'm thinking now: 1) Get the shot basically set up and lock the exposure, 2) Shine a flashlight on the subject and let autofocus do its thing in One Shot mode, 3) Turn the flashlight off and shoot.

This was extremely low light. I think I tried ISO at 1000 and 1250, but then also at 800. I wanted to keep noise down, so I think these last pics were at 800. I wanted a darker vibe. I think I also learned not to use a wide aperture when having focusing problems. Any other tips? Any comments are welcome.

#1

Candlestick by jneiberger2002, on Flickr


#2

Light Cube by jneiberger2002, on Flickr

 

[Neiby]

I've already decided that I was too close to the candlesticks. I should have been a little bit further back. I think they fill up too much of the photo. I think that's why I prefer the light cube photo. There is more open space. What do you think?

 

[Neiby]

Oh, I also switched to spot metering for the first time. My first shot came out really bad because the camera was on evaluative metering. Switching to spot metering allowed me to capture the scene how it looked in real life instead of having noisy, grey dark areas.

 

[nickzou]

If these are just stilllifes, you might as well just set the ISO to 100 and have a really slow shutterspeed. It's not like you are going to get motion blur or anything.

 

[Neiby]

Good point. I was using the two-second delay so I wouldn't shake the camera anyway. I could have lowered the ISO even more and gotten away with a much longer shutter speed. I don't have a remote, so the longest I could have done would have been 30 seconds, but that still would have worked just fine with a much lower ISO. I'll try that next time.

 

[KmH]

Set your White Balance to Tungsten too.

 

[Neiby]

Set your White Balance to Tungsten too.

I'll definitely try that. Let's see if I understand what it is actually doing. If I set WB to Tungsten in the camera, that is effectively telling the camera that I am shooting under "tungsten" conditions, so it will correct for that, effectively making my shot warmer that it would have been otherwise. Is that correct? If not, let me know and I'll read up on it some more. I'll definitely play around with it when I get home tonight.

Thanks, as always.

 

[KmH]

Our brain makes automatic corrections for different light souce color temperatures.

The camera doesn't have a brain. Tungsten light cause a yellow color cast if the camera white balance is set to 'Sunlight', and a green color cast if the camera white balance is set to 'Sunlight'.

Setting the camera white balance to 'Tungsten' would prevent a color cast so the light looks like it would to our eye. Understanding White Balance

 

[Neiby]

Thanks for the link! I had read it before, but I wasn't remembering the temperature of tungsten correctly. I was thinking that it was a higher temperature around fluorescent, not the lower temperature that it actually is.

I will take the same shots again tonight to see how they turn out. I should mention that I did tweak these a bit. I shot in RAW and tweaked them in LR until they looked like I wanted. It still might be worth setting the WB in the camera just to see how it turns out. I'll likely have better results since I would have less correcting to do.

 

[PJL]

The yellow cast in the first one works for me. It reminds me of a sepia photograph.

 

[Neiby]

The yellow cast in the first one works for me. It reminds me of a sepia photograph.

I like the deep cast and tones in the second one, too, but I'm still going to try Keith's suggestion regarding white balance to see how the results change.