Camera Settings

Architectural Night Photography  

Using a narrow aperture (around f/16) will not only ensure a deeper depth of field, so your shots are sharp from foreground to background, but will also make street lights ‘sparkle’ in your scenes to give your shots an added magical effect.

You can enable Mirror Lock-up in your camera’s menu to get around this potential pitfall.

Use your digital camera’s built-in self-timer to trigger the shutter after you’ve pressed the button to avoid any problems.

To ensure consistent results, manually set WB; try the Cloudy (6000K) setting to warm up your scenes (making them more orange) or Tungsten (3200K) to cool down the temperature (making them look more blue).

If you are using a tripod you can use ISO 100 because you won’t need fast enough shutter speeds to shoot out of hand but if you’re shooting an outdoor performance at night and working handheld, you’ll need to bump up the ISO (try ISO 1000 or ISO1600) to ensure a fast enough shutter speed for capturing sharp shots.

Try using a shutter speed of around 1/4-1/2sec so they’re ‘creatively’ blurred.