Photography: Low light photography

From left to right: 1. Folkets hus, Lund. f/1.8, 1/50 s, ISO 1000. 2. King Oscar's bridge, Lund. f/1.8, 1/50 s, ISO 400. 3. Department of Classical languages, Lund University. f/2.8, 8 s, ISO 200. Tripod. All taken with a Nikon AF Nikkor 50 mm 1:8D lens. All rights reserved.

Why?

Because you love to wander in the darkness, silly! Also, because a flash would most likely give you a completely different photo from what your eyes are seeing. It should be made clear that a camera can never capture a photo in the same fashion as our eyes does. Mainly because our eyes tends to render our vision more to black and white the darker it becomes, while a camera only sees in colour, and not in a composite of colour and black and white as the mammal eye does. So do expect to see an explosion of awkward colours in the dark!

Since photography is very much about light, it does become interesting and utterly fascinating to see what happens when you only got a small fraction of the usual amount of light available. Too much light usually blinds you. The interplay between light and shadow couldn't get more important for the composition with only a faction of the unusual light intensity. Shadows becomes the norm, and light the abnormal. Every beam of light makes their presence unmistakeable.

The amount of light also reflect the mood and atmosphere in a scene. Low levels of light can be interpret as a variety of things from emptiness to intimacy. This may give an extra component to an already good photo, it ought never to be the entire idea of the photo. That would just be effect seeking. The atmosphere of most streets and squares change over the course of the day. I guess that one has to ask oneself not only what is the most interesting to see as a viewer, but also when is it as most interesting to see as a viewer.

Low light photography also demands some affection for the minimalist view of aesthetics. Frankly, if it's dark, you don't see much at all. So whatever you capture has to make a statement of its own.

The Photos

1. This photo could be the archetype for hand held low light photography. The remnants of the suns beams has vanished and only the street lights are present. What hits you first is the large bright lit up area, which is interrupted by a big fat black line. The big fat black line is accompanied by two other parallel black lines through out the frame, of which one of them is almost obscured in darkness, almost to be kept as a secret for those who find it. On the other side of the frame from the big line, you got a suggestive shadow play on the wall from a tree from cross the street, as well as windows making geometric statements of their own. Not to forget the different colour fields that are nicely ordered over the frame that aren't as obvious as the would be in day light, making them something for the viewer to discover rather than being hit in the head by them as they would do in day light - white, red and blue is not what one would call a subtle mixture of colours, but when you reduce the amount of light they almost blend.

2. The sun had set about 45-50 minutes earlier, but some sun light was still available due to our planets curvature and my latitude. What probably strikes you first is all the red in the photo. This is because halogen lamps looks like that on photos, due to their light emittance curve. The red was vaguely visual for my eyes, but readily apparent when it hit the sensor of the camera, which obviously saw a lot more red than I ever could. The colour bands in the sky are due to the diffraction of light in the atmosphere, and vanished a few minutes later - these phenomena are short lived. Anticipate them if you wish to utilise them - and plan accordingly! Notice that all lines are heading towards the colour bands in the sky. The red road continues, in a sense, into the red colour in the sky. Of the series of photos I made from the bridge, was it this one with the light from a pair of head lights noticeable on the separation bar between the road and bicycle/pedestrian track, that made the largest visual impact. I can't say that I expected it to make such a big difference for the harmony of the composition.

3. This is a rather simple photo. Camera on tripod, long time exposure so I'll capture the wind moving a branch, different light sources that'll make different colours; street lights yellow (sky and road), incandescent lamp red (at entrance) and fluorescent lamp green (building). If awkward colours is your flavour, then go get some mixed light sources!

Technik

Doing low light photography hand held, you'll need a lens that has a large aperture, preferably f/2 or bigger, so you may collect as much light as possible without the need for long exposures. If you got a wide-angle lens you can probably get away with just f/2.8 since you may shake twice as much at for instance at 24 mm than you may at 50 mm to notice it in your results, hence allowing you to have twice as long shutter speed. I manage to do quarter of a second shoot hand held with my compact at f/2.6 without a noticeable shake in the photos, just because it has wide-angle. I use my Nikon AF Nikkor 50 mm 1:8D for all kinds of low light conditions on my proper camera. Unless you want some long exposures to blur movement, I see little point of investing in a tripod.

What about shallow focus when using such large apertures? It depends how far away your focus is. But focusing on things far away tends to increase your depth of field (how deep the focus goes). Why this is, ask a physicist! If my focus is 3 m away (which is rather close to the infinity mark) I usually have no problem with getting the rest behind it in focus too.

The light sensitivity ought to be somewhere between ISO 800 and 1600 after sun has vanished, and I usually have shutter speeds between 1/80 to 1/10 s, which is manageable with a 50 mm lens. I set this manually, because cameras like to think that everything is daylight, and expose accordingly to get a bright and contrasty photo. If your intention is to capture the darkness with obscure hints of light, of course you're going to let your photo to be mostly dark.

What's much more critical is the white balance. My experience is that one cannot always trust the auto setting, since there is too little light for the white balance sensor to get a clear reading. What also might be a problem with mixed light sources if shooting at twilight with artificial light - unless this is what you seek. If I'm shooting in the streets I set the white balance to light bulb (3000 K), since the lamp posts will be my primary light source. If I'm not pleased I might choose white balance manually somewhere between 2500 K and 3000 K, or just add a digital blue or amber filter to get the same effect.