Night Shots Made Easy (Kinda Sorta)

Just because the sun is going down, doesn't mean that you have to put your camera away. If you have a tripod, dust it off, and take a photo walk one night.

Night shots can be fairly simple. Mount your camera on a tripod(I use an el cheapo $40 piece of...) and set the program mode to Manual. For the shutter speed (SS), I simply start at around 1 second, check the exposure, and make the necessary adjustments. I keep my ISO at 200 to avoid noisy shots(turn off Auto-ISO if available). Next, set the aperture to get the desired depth of field. I took the shot, shown above left, at f/11, 5 seconds, and ISO 200.

So, the next time you feel that you've ran out of daylight, throw your DSLR on a tripod and try some long exposures. There's a lot of interesting subjects to shoot that you may have passed up during daylight hours!