World Thru A Camera Lens

I’ve always had a desire to learn to photograph at night, and I’ve experimented a bit with it, but not with much success. I’ve managed to capture some interesting cityscape shots, but I’ve never really gotten a good handle on the intricacies. I think with Harold Davis’ new book, Creative Night: Digital Photography Tips and Techniques released by Wiley in November 2009 is the primer I needed to really get better results. In this slim 240 page volume he explains the finer points of nighttime shooting and guides readers towards “[becoming] a creature of the night”.

The book is divided into several sections, and falls into three broad areas. First there is some introductory material about night photography: the type of equipment to use, camera settings, and most importantly – being safe. (Ironically in several captions of the accompanying pictures, the author talks about getting lost in the dark) The information is brief and to the point, providing rules of thumb for choosing aperture and ISO and some useful advice like making sure people know where you are going and having someone you can call when you get back safe.

Davis warns aspiring nighttime shooters that this is not an easy area to master. Early on in the book, he addresses the difficulty of getting an accurate focus manually, and the prevalence of noise in night photography due to high ISO settings, longer exposures, and under exposing pictures when shooting in the dark. Some of the included pictures by the author illustrate this. Many are very eye-catching, but others are plagued with an abundance of noise and lack of focus.

Locales and subjects form the middle part of the book, starting with urban compositions such as cityscapes, industrial areas, traffic and bridges. These provide a way for aspiring night time photographers to begin trying out this new type of photography. Following this Davis covers deciding on interesting composition, and photographing motion. Then the book delves into shooting in more remote locales, and shooting the night time sky including the moon and stars.

Finally, the last third of the book looks at some of the technical aspects of nighttime photography, including ways to keep noise out of your pictures during shooting and how to remove the noise that does manage to sneak in. This includes instruction on how to take night time images in a “stack” that generates star trails, and processing those stacked images in Photoshop.

All in all, Harold Davis’ Creative Night brings together a lot of very useful information for the shooter who wants to delve into this subject matter. 4 out of 5.