Night photography

I had an opportunity to spend a few days in Paris at the end of January and was really looking forward to doing the tourist thing with my camera. The heavily overcast skies were disappointing for daytime shooting, but the evenings held lots of promise - it is called the “city of lights” after all. But oops, this was a business trip, so all I packed was my dSLR and one extra lens. Okay, I broke the first rule of night photography, which is “use a tripod.” Ignore this rule and life becomes hard – but not impossible, with a little ingenuity. In fact, many tourist locations don’t permit tripods, so you’ll have to improvise anyway. Mini tripods (sometimes called tabletop tripods) work if your camera is not too bulky. They don’t take up much room in your luggage and are discrete enough on site that the security guard may not notice. However, I find that they are not robust enough to handle a dSLR. Beanbags work well because they cradle the camera while conforming to irregular surfaces. For example, suppose you are travelling by car and see a fleeting subject worth photographing. You can stop, put the bag on the roof and compose a shot in far less time than it takes to set up a tripod – specially if it’s in the trunk under a couple of suitcases. My “beanbag” is a lunch bag-size cloth sack filled with hard plastic craft beads that sits in the bottom of my camera bag. I also have ThePod (http://www.thepod.ca/), a Canadian creation, which is a circular beanbag that’s fitted with a threaded connector that screws into your camera’s tripod socket. The original is about the same diameter as a CD and five centimetres (two inches) thick; a smaller model is also available. Even without the cushioning effects of a beanbag, you can use whatever’s at hand to steady the camera, although you risk scratching the finish of your camera. I’ve rested mine on garbage bins and concrete walls, I’ve wedged it in an iron gate, pressed it firmly against a lamppost or tree trunk – and have got some good shots for the effort. Technology to the rescue In film photography, if you want to shoot in low light, you buy film that’s more sensitive – what’s called fast film. With digital, you don’t have to because most cameras now have a feature called variable ISO, with some manufacturers, notably Fujifilm, going as high as ISO 3200 in some models. I devoted last month’s column to variable ISO, but to recap within a night photography context, high ISO is not a free ride. As you amp up the signal, you also increase noise, and in digital photos, the noise shows up as miscoloured pixels that degrade the image. This is especially bothersome in night photography, because areas that should be black or nearly so look like they are raining confetti. Noise reduction systems have improved with each generation of camera, and now, depending on the camera and the scene, images taken at ISO 800 and beyond can be quite acceptable. However, a by-product of noise reduction is a softening of image detail. Panasonic introduced a setting on some of its cameras called Intelligent ISO, and one of its features is the ability to cap sensitivity – for example, to no higher than ISO 800 – so that you can control the amount of image degradation. Professional photographers have had an expensive system of image stabilization in their gear to help them in low light situations, and fortunately, this technology has trickled down to even point-and-shoot designs. Panasonic, notably has Mega OIS, which is an optical stabilization system across its entire line of consumer digicams, but Canon, Nikon and others are including this on more of their models too. Optical image stabilization systems typically use a floating lens element that counteracts the small tremors and movements of your hand, which are accentuated when you use a slow shutter speed. Another kind of mechanical image stabilization applies the principle of floating elements, not to the lens, but to the sensor. The result is similar – small hand movements and tremors are cancelled out. Night photography can be very rewarding, often adding a special dimension to a scene that, in daylight, would be quite ordinary. Digital also encourages experimentation since you don’t have to worry about paying for film development of all your failures.