The Dark Side ...

I've noticed that a good bit of the images I've been working on and drawn to lately have one thing in common. That would be low light dark images. Across many situations too. Dark clubs for concerts, very last few minutes of sunset, nighttime cityscapes, light painting in completely dark settings, and the like. I've got some pics to show, and some tips to tell for low light photography.

Get Stable

I took the panoramic image above in Jinja, Uganda at sunset in December. It was already pretty dark, and getting hard to get clear pictures while hand holding. I didn't bring a tripod, so I used the rail of the balcony to steady the camera. I pushed ISO to 1000. With my D200 I really don't want to go any higher than that because of the noise. Newer cameras like the D3, D700, D300s, and even the D90 deal with noise much better and make for clearer shots with ISO1600 and up. I could have pushed to 1600, but at the price of not only introducing noise, but also loss of color. The contrast and saturation tends to go down as ISO goes up.

Grasp Your Lighting Situation

I shot these at the bottletree, a cool Birmingham bar/music venue a couple weeks ago. The artist is Garrison Starr by the way. Like most bars with live music, this place is very dark with lots of colors. To get anything good in a place like this, I immediately assess the lighting conditions. I started out by setting ISO to 800 and aperture to f/2. All I brought was a D60 and a 50mm 1.8. Only manual focus on the D60 but I would've done that anyway in the low lighting. Then I tested to see how fast of a shutter speed I could get away with. The beauty of digital is that I can test, review, change, test, review, tweak. All while seeing the results immediately and not paying for developing. I settled for around 1/50 sec . There was enough light for it and I could lower to 1/30 if need be. That's my limit for handheld. I kept at 1/50 for most every shot of the artist though because she tended to move A LOT. Its important though to go into difficult lighting situations with an idea of how you'll be shooting. Find a base and work from it.

Get Creative

One more way to have fun with low light is to put your camera on a tripod and take advantage of long shutter speeds. Leave that shutter open and paint your scene exactly the way you want it lit. Get in a dark room or outside when its completely dark and use flashlights, glowsticks, christmas lights, or whatever to paint creative lighting onto still subjects or make some unique light art by moving small lights in patterns facing the camera.