Videos

Eren Sarigul offers five tips for cinematic night street photography: treat passers-by as film characters, seeking hats, umbrellas and trench coats; find a backdrop and work it from different angles before waiting for a subject; use a 35mm f/1.4 prime; hold 1/60 without clipping highlights; and chase colourful artificial light.

Brian Lloyd Duckett explains night street photography in London's Soho and Chinatown: hunt for light that gives depth and chiaroscuro contrast, study its hardness, direction and colour, build compositions around it, leave white balance on auto, use manual focus with red peaking, and carry primes covering 35 to 85mm equivalent.

Eren Sarigul shares his handheld settings for night street photography on a Fujifilm X-T4: find the highest tolerable ISO (3200 to 6400) and cap it with auto ISO, hold a minimum shutter speed near 1/80, favour a 35mm f/1.4 prime over f/2.8 zooms, and shoot bursts to beat camera shake.

Tim Jamieson shares nine night street tips. He shoots manual with a prime wide open, 1/125, ISO to suit, accepting grain for atmosphere; seeks neon, lamps and shop windows for colour contrast; layers in foreground texture; braves cold and rain for reflections and umbrellas; and slows for motion blur.

David Bergman answers a reader planning night-time wedding portraits with little ambient light and no assistant. He works through foreground and background exposure, contrasts flat direct flash with dragging the shutter, moves the flash off-camera, balances background lights, adds a second light and introduces flare behind the couple.

Paul Farris sets painting with light as week two of his lockdown photography challenge. A multi-second exposure lets a moving light source, even a phone torch, draw trails; he demonstrates with the self-timer, sweeping light behind a subject, darkening via exposure compensation, then wrapping it around the subject.

Paul Farris sets out fireworks essentials: a tripod, a remote release or two-second self-timer, arriving early for test shots, an 18mm or wider lens, and manual focus when autofocus has only black sky. He suggests shutter priority, ISO 400 and four to ten second exposures, or manual mode.

Trevor Jones photographs the Milky Way over a river from a dark 85-acre property, using an unmodified Canon DSLR, 18-55mm kit lens and basic tripod, no tracker or filters. He covers new-moon timing, escaping light pollution, manual mode and focus, and shooting eight to ten frames to stack.

RealWorld uses an entry-level Nikon D3400 on a tripod for two kinds of night photography. From a bridge over a road he captures headlight and tail-light trails with an eight-second exposure at f/32, then photographs the uplit Palladium in Carmel after midnight at ISO 100, f/10 and 1.6 seconds.

Jason Vong explains how to shoot cleaner low light photographs without flash. Drawing on recommended accessories, including a Joby GorillaPod, a Manfrotto mini tripod and fast primes for Sony, Canon, Nikon and Fujifilm, he covers ways to cut digital noise, such as steadying the camera and gathering more light.