Mountain Photography at Night

92 sec f 6.3 ISO  800

On  our  South Col treks , I often try to do some night photography when the weather is clear and the stars are out. Recently in Nepal  I was able to  experiment with a lot of mountain photography at dusk and at night.  I am sharing some tips and useful suggestions in this post:

TRIPOD

It goes without saying that the first requirement for night photography of mountains is a strong rock steady tripod. Monopods and table top tripods are not real substitute to a good tripod. I know this means lugging up and down the mountain another 1 to 2 kgs of weight but if you need to shoot long exposures then you need the tripod. This will really help you to get rock steady photos at long exposures. I use an Oban tripod one of the entry level lightweight model weighing around 1.5 kg.

VR/IS

If your camera is on a tripod set VR or IS off - you don't need any vibration reduction as the tripod is supposed to be rock steady!

AUTOFOCUS

Please do set autofocus off and focus your lens manually - my experience is that with autofocus on the camera hunts for a correct focus point at night!

ISO

The newer generation of DSLRs have pushed high ISO performance to 3200 and 6400 with some amazingly good results but I am conservative in this regard – if I can put my camera on a tripod I still prefer the lower ISO settings 200-1000 with longer exposures.

APERTURE

I would usually select a middle of the range aperture like f5.6 , f6.3 or f8 unless I need depth of field from foreground right up to infinity. In that case I may even stop down to f16!

SHUTTER SPEED and METERING

After setting the ISO and aperture the balancing factor would be the shutter speed. It is hard to select the shutter speed in low light and make a perfect exposure. There is a lot of black and deep shadows in the photograph and usually the metering is fooled by this resulting in some over exposure. As a rule of thumb setting the exposure compensation to -0.7 and bracketing two stops around the meter reading usually gives one good shot! Speeds can be as low as 15 sec, 30 sec and sometimes even one minute using this bracketing technique.  Most DSLRs wont go below 30 sec so you would have to switch to bulb mode  fire the shutter with a remote release and then close it again. 

30 sec, f7.1 ISO 200 

WHITE BALANCE

I usually set the white balance to Auto and keep it that way - in case there is any extraordinary colour shift I would correct it in processing. but this is not usual.

RAW

Oh and finally do shoot raw - makes a huge difference to the final image!

For more night photos please do visit  www.sujoydas.com