Hey there today i'd like to go ahead and show you some low light and make photography tips on this tutorial and these are some really handy tips if you're getting new into doing night photography or you never done night photography and look and you might be get into it so let's get started so on this tutorial i'm actually going to go over the best website and apps for night photography these are really handy to have for planning out your night shoot and we're also going to look at the what gear do you need for night photography there's some necessity gear that you do need and it doesn't necessarily cost you a fortune to get either also i'm going to do is what is the best time of year to capture the Milky Way so we're going to go over the time period depending on what part of the world you might be in for capturing the Milky Way and this particular shot you see right here was actually taken in silverton colorado and it was right after the first snow in the fall and i was able to capture the Milky Way shootin right over town it's pretty cool be in the right place at the right time okay for those of you that might be following me on social media I've probably noticed a lot of my photographs are night photography type photographs so if you haven't been following me you might want to go ahead and check the links below this video and that will direct you in the right direction for you know if you want to follow me on Facebook or Instagram or Google+ so a really good website to check out and this is a free one it's called a dark sky finder you can either google it or just go under website dark sky finder com this is actually a really slick the website you can actually zoom in to the location you're at and it works for any part of the world you might be in and what it's going to show you is where the worst light pollution is and where the darkest guys might be in your location so if you look up at the chart above you'll see that obviously the brighter the color that's the more light pollution than less stars you're going to see at night but to the left the darker the color that's the best sky's to try to do night photography in now a really good app to get for your phone it's called deluxe moon standard and what's really cool about this app it only costs a buck ninety-nine it's really cheap this is a really handy app to have in your phone and I actually use this on a lot for planning out different shoots at different times of the month and what's really cool it actually shows the moon rise and set times and also it's going to show you on a calendar when the new moon is for the best night photography and full moon for doing more landscape night photography so a good tip is for gear is to find yourself a good head lamp but you want to make sure that headlamp has a red light on it this red light what's really good about it it helps from impaired in your vision so I. Find actually a lot of times when I'm out shooting really late at night for long periods of time my eyes will actually adjust more and more to the dark skies to where I don't even have to turn on the headlamp even on a moonless night but as soon as you do have to turn on the headlamp you can mess with your eyes and then you're trying to readjust again so a good tip is if you do have a headlamp with a red lamp you just only use the red lamp when needed and that will actually help for you know keeping your eyes from dilating too much and a good head lamp with a hundred fifty Luminum is a probably your best bet and you can actually it's nice about that bright of a headlamp is you can keep it on the red light and still be hiking along so the next thing we're going to look at is having a good camera for night photography now one thing for sure is full frame cameras have the best for low noise and most of the newer cameras nowadays have amazing low noise on them at high ISO. But I just want you to know you don't have that buy a super expensive camera to do night photography in fact a huge portion of my photographs i'll be showing you on this slide show we're actually taken with a nikon d 3200 now that camera body alone only costs 350 bucks but it's the lenses that make the difference a lot of times to wear the full frame sensor does come in is you can actually shoot a higher ISO and what's really good is you don't have to use the noise reduction in the camera so for example you can shoot a 30-second shot with full frame and then shoot another 30 second right after that without have to do noise reduction work on the nikon d 3200 i'll do a 30 second shot and then i have a 30 seconds of noise reduction going on in the camera so it takes one minute to shoot a 30-second shot and if i don't use that noise reduction feature in that camera the picture will come out really bad we're acadia me fix it in post production so full frame cameras if you have the money is the way to go for doing night photography but at the same time there's ways to get around it too to save you some money if you're just getting started now I an obvious one is having a good tripod that goes a long ways you know having a good tripod to sit you know this is going to be sturdy it's not going to be flimsy it can hold up into windy situations that come along and there's going to be a lot of times you might be out shooting at night where the wind does pick up and that's where it's good to have a nice good sturdy tripod it's not gonna move on yeah and what I like to do with these tripods is to either get a good ball head or a pistol grip these are two handy attachments for the tripod that work really good for adjusting your camera at night so these are definitely worth looking into and once again you don't have to go out and spend a fortune on the tripod but it's worth spending at least say 150 bucks to get a decent one at the minimum but you can't get away with cheaper ones if you shop around now another one I like to talk about is knowing your camera settings now I can't stress it enough that if you're out shooting with other people it's good to know your camera settings where you're not having to turn your head lamp on all the time because every time you turn a head lamp on you're disturbing other people around you that might be doing night photography with you so a good trick to do is to actually get your camera hang out in your living room shut all the lights off do this at night when it's really dark and start trying to figure out your buttons on your camera and the biggest things you want to know is the self timer on your camera and know the play button and the zoom in and out buttons for checking pictures and see how focus their in so that's a good little trick is to do a little test run on that and you want to do is look into buying a good camera remote so one big advantage of a camera remote to use then trying to use your self timer every single time in your camera / shooting night Photography is the beeping noise now you can you can do is undo the noise or undo beeping on your programming in your camera but a lot of times to just having a remote with the cord hooked into your camera works really good too so another really good remote this is one I use all the time it's a multi-function remote works good for time-lapse photography and this also works pretty slick too if you want to be in your picture say you're by yourself somewhere so what I'll do a lot of times I'll set this remote to say one minute start it and then I'll go run to get in position with my head lamp lit up and then once it clicks down to a minute then the shot will pull off which usually can last anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds so this is a good way to do some self photographing and then I also use this all the time for a lot of my time lapse so if any of you have been checking out any of my landscape photography type adventure videos I do post on this channel and you see some of those night time lapses or even the day ones they're all actually taken with this remote now another really cool remote that just came out and I'm actually getting ready to purchase this one this one runs for about a hundred bucks and it's at Alpine laboratories.Com and it's called the plus wireless remote this thing is actually really slick it actually runs off your phone and you just kind of hook it into your hot shoe up above and what's really cool with this one is you can do time-lapse you can adjust your settings for you know different types of photographs and what's you can beat it and this makes it like of your own remotes what's really cool about it so it's definitely worth checking this one out if you it's probably the most advanced mode remote that's come out now so it's definitely one I'm going to add into my personal kit there and obviously it does run off your smartphone and it's great for time lapse and photographing the stars so a really good thing to probably put in your camera bag is buy some Mag lights for your camera bag and I'm going to show you why it makes your night photography stand out when you can what they call light painting with these bag lights so what I did here this was taken a couple summers back i was driving on a remote mountain road late at night and it came up the spot and I could tell off in the distance the Milky Way was starting to break out in the clouds so I. Parked my truck jumped out set up the tripod throwing the camera and I set my self timer on the camera for about five seconds just didn't want to be dealing with the remote then I grabbed a Maglite and I set up the bag light to where it's a harsh setting on it so you can usually do a real spread out one or you can go into a tight beam with it so i set the tight beam on that one hit the cell tower five seconds and then all of a sudden the camera went for 30 seconds so this is going to be a 30 second shoot on my wide-angle mm lens so once the shot started then lens opened up I started on the left side and started painting up and down and I went along the ground and then I slowly went to the right side kind of painted up the grass and then went up the trees on the right side just a little bit and then I.
Shut the headlamp off I did all that in 10 seconds and then there are still 20 seconds left to go for the shot so I. Just kind of stayed still kept it really dark there and after the full 30 seconds was completed this was the result of that photograph and this one actually turned out pretty sweet look and I did enjoy this night and I'm surprised on how good that photograph turned out so a good thing with night photography is you want to buy lens with Infinity focus now you see down to the bottom right that's a symbol for infinity focus and then go ahead and look on your lenses you might actually have one of these lenses in your bag right now but if not I'm going to go through some lenses that you might want to look at buying so these are really handy for focusing that night I. Pretty much always focus on Infinity when shooting the stars because if you don't have that it's really hard to dial in your manual focused to try to get the stars to look clear one of my most favorite lenses which I probably use this one probably eighty percent of the time when I'm doing my night photography is the tokina 11-16 millimeter f 2.8 Lens some of the things I do love about this lens it's the wide angle that could definitely capture a lot of the Milky Way with this lens and what another good feature is the price on it this one actually you can find it online on amazon or ebay for around 450 bucks and it's amazing that glass and the quality of pitchers I've been able to achieve off of this lens and what's really good about it it's a really fast lens at an aperture of 2.8 Also known as the f-stop so the trick is to find the lowest aperture lens so 2.8 Or lower like 1.8 Which is really fast or really good ones for doing night photography so another really good lens is to Rokinon 14 millimeter 2.8 Lens another really fast lens it's a fixed 14 millimeter where you can't really zoom in or out but what's really good about this one is the price and you can find this one online for around three hundred bucks US dollars so it's definitely a good lens and it's really sharp glass and once again the quality from this lens is really amazing so definitely a good one to check out also so another lens i have in my tool bag is the or my camera bag actually is the nikon 28 millimeter f 2.8 Lens believe it or not this lens is very cheap 50 to 100 bucks us this was actually my first lens i bought for night photography when i first started getting into it also broke at the time that this was kind of a good intro lens for learning night photography and I've been able to pull off a lot of pretty amazing pictures over the years and I. Still use this lens to this day and I.
Just can't believe the quality of the glass that's in this lens when you first buy it it just feels so cheep but the quality of images you get off r is pretty amazing and actually that picture to the right was a recent shoot i did i was up on the Boreas Pass or user Hoosier pass where that was taken at and this was actually taken with the 28 millimeter lens and the quality of that photograph i was very impressed with it so still one of my more favorite lenses to this date another great lens to look into and i probably use this lens the second most for night photography is the 50 millimeter f 1.8 Lens this lens is amazing the quality of pictures i get off of this lens just blows my mind on the glass and what's really cool about this one it's still a really affordable lens around 180 bucks us and shopping around once again on amazon ebay you might even be able to find it a little bit cheaper that picture to the right was taken with this 50 millimeter lens and this was taken just outside of Canyonlands National Park on a camping trip I did a couple years back and we were camping up against this rock wall at his camp ground and it was so cool looking with the fire lighten up everything so I. Actually walked away from camp and it was such a calm night smoke and everything was just going straight up so this is one of those photographs that to this day I just love and it's really cool that you know I was able to pull this off with such a affordable lens on top of that so a good tip to think about when doing night photography the lower the apertured number which is your f-stop the lower the ISO you can get away with because here's one thing if you could be cranking out iso really high up getting up around 3200 or even 6400 or above and of course some of these newer cameras you can get away with that especially the full frames and not have such a noisy picture but if you don't have a full frame Camera you start reaching up to the 6400 iso or higher your pictures are going to look absolutely horrible so the trick is just get yourself a really fast lens get that ISO as low as you can get away with sometimes doing a lot of star photography 1600 I can get away with but like this shot here I was able to get away with only a 400 ISO on this one which kept it to really less noise so once again to review the lower the aperture number the lower the ISO which equals lower noise in your photographs so if you want your photographs to be nice and clear without having to do a lot of post-production try to get that ISO as low as possible this photograph was actually taken with the 50 millimeter lens too and I shot this one but the Copper Mountain Resort and it was probably about 40 45 minutes after sunset there is still a light blue tent in the sky the stars are just barely starting to show through and I. Pulled this off by doing a five second exposure at F 5.6 Iso 100 now to probably make this photograph even better would have been to jump up the aperture to a 7.1 And I probably could have reduced the time down to save three seconds I just basically wanted enough light to show the mountain in the backdrop with the blue light but yet you know try to keep the lights on not get too overexposed as you could tell in this shot the lights did get a little bit over exposed and I wasn't able to really dial it in you know in post-production there and another good tip all my photos I do take are in raw format and I purposely do that because I. Have a lot more control in post-production especially a lightroom and photoshop and editing and I'll probably do like a lot of future tutorials on how i edit out these kind of photographs and there's definitely some good tricks to know how to do these okay now I want to show you or actually tell you some of the best times to capture the milky way and that is actually starting late spring through early fall that is when the milky way is that what i would call at its glory around here so this particular photograph was actually shot in early September I was down in the San Juan Mountains backpacked way up into the mountains and a good tip with a milky way is to have good southern exposure if you're up in the northern hemisphere and I wanted this one to be where I had the tent the fire have a subject in there which actually turned out to be me since I was the only one on this trip and then have the mountains as kind of a backdrop with the silhouette there so this one actually turned out pretty sweet I put it in the portrait mode set up the camera on the tripod set the timer for about 10 seconds once I.
Hit that trigger I ran over to the fire and that here's a tip if you're doing this with a fire you want to make sure the fire is not blazing really bright so this was just barely burnin it was pretty pretty low and then also I threw a light a flashlight actually lit up in my tent and then my headlamp I had that set at max power and that headlamp I had that this particular time was pretty cheesy so there wasn't really a really good beam coming off of it or some of the newer headlamps you can get some just amazing beans so anyways I hit that timer five seconds ran or ten seconds ran over got in position and then I had to stand perfectly still for 30 seconds so here's the settings I used on this one 30 seconds aperture 2.8 ISO 1600 so I try to keep the ISO as low as I can get away with the try to keep from so much noise because this was actually shot with the nikon d 3200 and then i was using my 11 millimeter wide angle lens and i like the way this photograph turned out it actually turned out pretty sweet-looking of course i want to redo this photograph now with the full frame camera I bet I can even make it twice as better so good tip there for you okay both of these shots of old cabins we're taking up in a remote section of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado I was actually out exploring during the daytime four-wheeling off on some of the old mining roads and I came across these old buildings and I noticed they had some really good southern exposure so I do the Milky Way would be shining nice and bright above them so what I did is that that evening I went back to town and had some shots of sunsets and then ate some dinner and then cited once it got all dark to drive back out to this location so to actually get to this spot I pulled off the highway it was probably a good 20 minute drive up a single lane dirt road which got pretty rough towards the top and this road winded really tight corners with probably 500 foot sheer drops off to one side so it's kind of one of those roads you definitely don't want to drive off of so then I finally made it to this location no moon out on this night so it's really dark pulled in once I got out of the vehicle i was driving the wind was just whipping through this location it must been blowing 15 20 to 30 miles an hour sometimes so anyways I grabbed my headlamp grab the bag light set up the camera on a tripod and the first shot I. Did pull off was on the upper right hand corner there so I set the camera for 30 seconds f 2.8 Iso 3200 now I had to do 3200 on this one because I really had to try to bring out some of the backgrounds with the light painting and I used my 11 millimeter wide angle lens on both these photographs so the wind was wiping but thankfully the wind kind of eased off just a hair where wasn't howling too much and I hit the trigger I had it on the self timer for about five seconds so I hit that trigger by seconds goes and I also click it starts it lends opens up and I'm doing my 30 seconds recording on us so what's that 30 seconds started I spent about probably good 10-15 seconds with the light and lit up the fence in the foreground and then I had a brighter light i used for the background where aimed it did light up the building and some of the trees back there after I. Pulled off that photograph I walked on over to the other building what you see below got up pretty close to the building since I had a wide angle lens and once again the winds were still whipping at this point set the camera five second timer hit it and what was really cool about this the clouds were whipping across this guy so anyways as I. Was taking this picture everything was going nice and smooth and then once the photograph was done all of a sudden the craziest thing happened right then the wind just stopped instantly and everything went perfectly still and then all of a sudden this really cold air like came over me and I got the weirdest feeling I've ever experienced in my life in fact my hair on my neck and my arm started to stand up and I was like man this isn't right pretty much scared the crap out of me so I ended that break then grabbing the camera on the tripod through it over my shoulders and running back to the SUV I rented it for this trip popped over in the back of the SUV just threw my camera in there ran over to the driver's side door right when I put my hand on the driver side door handle all of a sudden the wind came back and the cold air went away it was probably one of the freakiest things that are experienced I jumped into vehicles so screw this and spun on out of there and I was kind of bummed because there was probably three more buildings there I.
Really wanted to photograph but there was a lesson learned on this and that is don't photograph at haunted mining camps alone I had not shit beyond us so anyways if you don't believe you used to go up there to this location which is located outside of Telluride and just go do a night photograph by yourself and see if anything happens to you pretty interesting place ok i want to show you real quick on some different types of night photography and these are a lot of them that you might see in my posts that I do post all the time obviously a full moon photography that's a really good one I love doing full moon photography so this one was taken for 20 seconds and I would kept my aperture at 7.1 So here's a good tip if you can keep your aperture at 7.1 To say eight point or you know some point when I found actually is probably one of the best ones for keeping your pictures the sharpest for night photography so it's kind of the lowest i can usually get away with when it comes to doing brighter nights with full moon and yet i could still keep the buildings in the background or whatever subject i might have and it keeps it nice and crisp and clear now to lower the aperture or your f-stop you go the more softer your pictures are going to start to look so but you usually don't have a choice on that when you're just doing Milky Way shots but when you're doing full moon shots you can give away with higher apertures which creates a really nice picture and also I kept the ISO as low as I could get away with with that aperture setting I was able to get away with 400 iso on this one I used a 12 millimeter lens and what's so crazy about this location I was at thirteen thousand four hundred and eighty seven feet above sea level which is about 4111 meters above sea level there and so definitely thin air at this point very cool temperatures on this night but it was probably one of the most amazing night because right when I showed up this moon was rising over those Peaks off in the backdrop and I'd love that cast of the shadows that were cut across the ski slopes if you look kind of on that photograph you can see the shadows of the trees kind of cutting across there so i thought this picture turned out pretty cool looking so another good thing to do with night photography I. Called it the blue light photography so that get the blue light photography this is either done before sunrise or after sunset and it's usually I found the best lights probably 40 40 minutes after sunset or 40 minutes before sunrise you got this little tiny window probably like 15 20 minutes max to try to pull off some cool photographs now this works pretty slick I used a on this one I used by 11 millimeter lens on this on a really wide angle and this was taken at the Breckenridge Nordic Center Lodge this is like a beautiful new log cabin lodge just built Mills just wrapped up around this period of time and we had about an inch of snow come through and kind of blanket everything and I noticed the snow stopped the skies are starting to break so I was like just go out for some evening photography I. Came up to this location he can actually see my tire tracks down below there and then often a distance the clouds are just starting to break where a little blue sky was starting to poke through so set in my camera I found the best setting for this shot turned out to be like 15 seconds once again I had my aperture at 7.1 So i can keep the building as sharp as possible and i was able to get away with an iso 100 on this shot so these photographs if you ever photograph in buildings or homes this is a great time to do those kind of photographs is probably what i call the blue light our your pictures will pop out more than anybody else's and you want to get jobs out there for shooting you know commercial or residential and the realtor's and stuff too they just love these kind of photographs a great way to make extra money out there so just to give you some good tips now doing this type photograph does take a lot of practice and I'm probably going to need to do is do a very thorough tutorial in the future on how to pull off these types of photographs and there is a bit of post-production you could do to really make these pictures poppy than that much more so those will be future tutorials coming down the pipeline here so so another good type of night photography is just going around your city or small town and this particular photograph I actually shot with my 50 millimeter lens this was taken for eight seconds aperture at f 13 and iso 100 this photograph came in so sharp and it looks really cool now one thing to let you know when you start cranking up the aperture a little bit what you're going to notice is the lights will start having what I call like light rays coming off of them and I'll have to do in a hold another tutorial on that kind of stuff to it's a pretty interesting effect he can create without even doing you know having a special lens or anything but this particular photograph I shot through a tree because this guy obviously was really dark on this night there's no moon out so I kind of stationed it just don't nuff to kind of look through three with the fresh fallen snow and it I like the effect on how this one turned out it turned out pretty cool looking so definitely get a good one to try out there so another one I. Like to do is fireworks photography so they're into winter months up here in the ski resort to Colorado this was actually taken over at Keystone ski resort and throughout the ski season every Saturday evening they shoot fireworks off so I came over to this location known some fireworks is going to be shot and this particular picture I.
Was able to pull off with my 13 millimeter lens I shot it for 10 seconds aperture 7.1 Once again trying to keep the building and everything looked real sharp and I ISO100 what's kind of neat with this one is some of the people were blurry but yet some of the people came out perfectly clear in this shot so it kind of gives it that kind of a real cool perspective and I was able to capture the streaking of the fireworks at the same time pretty cool fireworks doing fire photography can be a little challenging but it's definitely worth pulling off and then there's a lot of people that pull off a lot amazing photographs you see on the internet out there so definitely worth trying out so another tip I want to give you is scoping out your location for doing your night shots I can't stress enough how great google earth is for doing this i love this program so they have it you can actually download it on your computer for free or they actually have a free app too I use this thing so much and I because I'm always traveling to new locations i'm always zooming in to these locations so that way i could figure out where is the Sun coming up where is it going to go down and try to get some ideas for photographs so that's another feature tutorial coming up is I'll just have to go through some details on Google Earth and show you the little tips and tricks on using this program it's definitely worth downloading so here's some future upcoming tutorials that are coming down the pipeline I'm going to actually be making one on promoting your photos on social media and the best time to be posted those and the biggest thing is the size you post because you get a remember especially like Facebook or Google+ people can download those pictures into the computer so you never ever wanted to upload a full file size picture unless you don't mind it getting stolen out there and i'm sure i've had many many photographs stolen around the world but those are small file sizes so it's going to be really difficult for them to be blowing up a really nice big photograph with them some other tutorials i'm looking at making for you guys is a different i definitely want to show you ways of backing up your photography all your digital files and stuff there's several different steps i do because back in two thousand to two thousand and two and digital cameras were really starting to come in I lost two years with photographs from a computer crash and I could blame those on a couple roommates at the time and then I also want to make a tutorial on different ways you can make money as a photographer and there's a lot of ways of making really good money out there and some are pretty obvious but there's other ones that a lot of photographers have yet to get on boards do yet and it's a huge market that's been barely even touched yet and the potential is just endless the amount of money you can make off that so there'll be a future tutorial coming down the pipeline so anyways I would definitely subscribe if you haven't subscribed they got some really good tutorials coming down the pipeline and also my other videos I'm going to try to pull these out on Friday is the day I'm going to try to release these tutorials and then every Wednesday I'm trying to release the landscape photography adventure videos and those videos basically is the story behind each photograph or what I go through a lot of times for taking these photographs and I try to make them entertaining and their work in progress so hopefully I'll get them into some TV. Quality type shows down the road you never know where those might go so anyways I hope this definitely helped you out if it if it did hit that like button down below share this tutorial with people that you think it might help them out and I have many more coming down the pipeline so you guys be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on next one you have yourself a really good one.
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