My Journey into Night Photography Begins

OK, I have pretty much completed my last project (to shoot all the tidal pools on the Northern Beaches). Now I'm onto my next Project.... Night Photography!

Last night I went out with Haggis for a night shoot. It was a blast. Here's two of my images from the first outing.









Here's the key takeways from that shoot.

1) Night shooting is a hell of a lot more social. Lots of time to talk and chat while the camera is exposing.

2) Incredible possibilities with night photography and many new elements involved.

• You have got light painting options (what sort of light source, what temperature, how often, which angles, how direct etc.)
• The moon comes into play (how bright, what angle etc.)
• You have the clouds and wind... how big of a cloud streak do you want
• Ambient light
• New technical challenges (metering in super low levels, noise issues)
• You have composition challenges (can't see what you are shooting)

3) Need to get a grip on some new technical challenge, primarily around noise reduction and management.

Tonight I'm going to start a series of experiments to try to minimise the noise from super long exposure images. I'm going to try making some custom Noise Ninja profiles and also test out just how well the Long Exposure Noise Reduction works.

I will post my results here.

Best thing about night photography is the pace.... It can sometimes take an hour or more to get one shot right, so you might as well take a bottle of red wine and a chair, and just slow down and enjoy the evening.