From the course: Landscape Photography: Night Landscape

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Exposing at night

Exposing at night

From the course: Landscape Photography: Night Landscape

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Exposing at night

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- Determining exposure at night is not really any different from determining exposure in the daytime. In each case, you're dealing with reflected light on the scene. Light falling upon the scene that's reflected back toward the camera. The big difference in practical terms, of course, is that at nighttime there is far less light that's being reflected back towards the camera and so to compensate for that you have to use much longer exposure times in order to get a shot where you can actually see detail in the scene. That's why of course we have the camera on a tripod here to stabilize it for during those really long exposure times. I'm gonna bring this shot back up that I just took. This was 30 seconds at f/2.5. Now what I'm photographing here is really almost an abstract shot. It's just looking out over the salt and sea. You can see the horizon in the distance. A light bit of orange glow from the geothermal power plants on the south shore. Most of it really is just the sky. I'm just…

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