Photography lighting is an important part in capturing the right photographs. Now, it is not only well lit photographs have a story to tell, photographs that are shot at night have their own beauty. Night photography is an important aspect of photography. Now, we are in darkness for about twelve hours each day, this does not mean that you can click pictures only in the morning. Commercial photography often flooded with requests for late night or very early morning shoots where there is very less light. Here are some tips to improve your photography at night. Find the proper light. Now, you may be thinking, if I had the proper light why would I even be reading this post. Well, the fact of the matter is, light is important. It is not an abundance of light that matters, it is where this abundance of light is present. Now, if you have seen pictures in some photo sites, you would see that many of them are lit from different angles. Thought these might have been taken in the night, the place where the light falls is important. Even if the light available is very little. If you are using a professional camera, then be sure to position the flash to a position where it does not look like a black and white crime scene photo. This essentially means, focus the available light on the parts you want to be covered. For example, if you are shooting some wedding photography at a late night event, then make sure that the light falls on an angle that gently illuminates the faces of your subjects. You might have seen some photographs with people having red eyes, though sometimes this cannot be avoided, most of the time, by placing the light at proper angles you can reduce this redness to a level that is acceptable. Some camera phones have good night shooting modes that use proprietary algorithms to shoot better photos at night. If you have one of these phones than be sure to experiment with them too. Focus manually Most of the people who look at taking night shots think that automatic focus is the best. But the problem is that automatic focussing algorithms that are written onto your mobile cameras or professional cameras do the trick when there is proper lighting. Automatic focus often fails when there is low light involved in the environment that you are clicking photographs in. This is extensively seen while clicking urban photography shots at night. You might be trying to click pictures of illuminated buildings that are shining against the pitch-dark background or you may be trying to take a photograph of the cars that are moving on the road on a busy day. Whatever it might be, auto focus often fails in these situations. Many people who are not that into photography might think that manual focus means squinting your eyes and looking at the viewfinder. That is not actually the case, you can use the digital screen, zoom into the point that you want to focus on and turn that small circle on the screen to get the proper focus. Use a different format for saving your photographs. This might not be possible for people who are using a smartphone camera (though some advanced smartphone cameras allow this). But, changing the format that your photographs make a huge difference. You might be under the impression as to how changing formats would do any difference as the photo is already captured anyway. That is not exactly true. Different formats have different algorithms for storage. Your typical JPEG photographs are smaller than the RAW type of photographs. This difference in size is actually a bigger deal than you thought. JPEG pictures are compressed a lot to save space on the memory card that you are using with the camera. A better format would be the RAW format. The RAW format stores more details than your typical JPEG does. These RAW format photos are also easier to edit. Well, actually they have to be edited so that you can keep the details that you want and ignore the ones that you do not need. This is particularly useful in engagement photography. Though the RAW format consumes a lot of memory, the sacrifice is worth it. You will get better pictures in the night because the amount of detail is more. Besides, you can always convert these photos to a more space friendly format like the JPEG once you are done with a final outlook of editing the picture.
