Tips or Recipes for Night Photography Without Flash Anyone?

All these photos in today’s blog post were taken late at night. So how do you take pictures when it’s dark outside, and you prefer not to use a flash?

First, shift into Manual mode.

Next, bump up your ISO. We went all the way up to 3200 for the images above. As we illustrate in Beyond the Green Box, the higher ISO causes more graininess in the image. But the high ISO also helps you get away with not having to use a flash.

Third, go as low as you can in your aperture to let as much light in as possible. Our aperture was down at 1.4 or Fstop 1.4.

Fourth, the shutter speed was pretty slow. It was 1/8th of a second for the gladiator shots. You would almost think the one of “Diego the Gladiator” standing still would have more blur because the shutter speed was so slow. Normally the image would have more blur if it was 1/8th of a second, but we were shooting these with the Sony 300 DSLR. The new Sony DSLR cameras have an image stabilizer inside the camera body instead of on the lens, so you can go a lot slower in your shutter speed and still get a pretty clear image. It’s seriously AWESOME! No sharpening on these images, straight out of the camera.

For the “BAND” photos of the guys, I was able to go up in my shutter speed because the flame cast so much more light than the candles on the table. My shutter speed was up at 1/200th of a second. I kept my aperture and ISO at the same place.

I hope you enjoy!

Post your photos from night photography without flash on my Facebook page, I’d love to see them and give some feedback!