Night/Low-Light Photos

[eagle-i4031]

Newbie question.

I've just recently started getting more serious about photography. I have a Canon XSi with standard lens (and a 55-250). I also recently got a tripod with remote shutter trigger for low-light photos. It seems like everytime i take a photo at night, or in real low-light situations, the pictures are, i guess you'd call it grainy, and not very clear.

Can this be fixed with settings on my camera?, or would i need some type of special equipment? Looking for advice on how to get better low-light picture quality, what do i need to know?

Thanks in advance.

 

[HannahRebekah]

Do you have it on the auto setting? That would be your first mistake. With auto, the camera will guess (usually badly) what the best settings for the situation would be. What it's likely doing here, is uping your ISO to a ridiculous height instead of decreasing your shutter speed. (If any of these terms are confusing, just ask and I'll explain.) If you're taking pictures of still things, set it to manual and use the lowest aperture possible along with a rather low ISO (I wouldn't go higher than 250), and a lower shutter speed (don't know how low light you're talkin', maybe a couple seconds?). Hope that helps. If you have questions, just ask. P.S. A higher ISO gives brighter but grainier photos, whereas a lower ISO gives less grainy but darker photos.

 

[eagle-i4031]

Thank you for the quick feedback.

I should have given a little more detail about the shot. I have some photos I can post a little later so you'll have a better idea of the scenario, but I don't have access to the pictures at the moment.

Basically, I was taking a picture of the moon and it's reflection in a pond behind my house. I live outside of town, so the only light was the light from the moon with a blanket of snow covering the ground (which helped brighten it up a bit more). I was using a tripod and remote shutter trigger to eliminate camera shake and taking pictures with mainly shutter priority mode (none with full auto). I experimented with different shutter speeds to get a picture i was happy with, but once i viewed the picture on my computer, it was much more grainy looking than i expected.

ISO is not something i have messed with yet, and really not sure how ISO affects pictures. Any details about it would be great.

I will post a picture at a later time, but most likely tomorrow.

Thanks again.

 

[HannahRebekah]

What ISO stands for is really quite confusing. Basically what I said is the details you would need to know. I would keep it at 100 for typical shooting, though some keep it at 200. For that kind of shot, I would probably end up using a 30 second exposure with lowest to up to 6 aperture and ISO 250 or less. See what that does.

 

[eagle-i4031]

Again, thanks for the advice. Next chance I get to take some night shots, I'll mess around with the ISO settings, and do a little extra research about ISO.

Thanks!