Because the night was made for painting with light
HEADTORCH
Unsurprisingly, it can be tricky to see where you’re walking in the dark, and camera buttons and dials can be difficult to set when you can’t see them. A headtorch is a cheap and vital accessory for shooting at night and keeps your hands free. Look for a headtorch with a red filter because this is much more subtle and doesn’t affect your night vision as much as a bright white LED.
01 SET UP ON A TRIPOD
For this technique, you’re taking plenty of longexposure images, and then blending them together in software to build up the final result. This means that setting up on a sturdy tripod is vital to help all of the different merged images line up perfectly in post.
02 NAIL THE FOCUS
The easiest way to focus in the dark is for you or a friend to shine a bright torch on the area that you’d like to be sharp, so your camera can autofocus on it. We focused on this gravestone to make it the focal point and then switched the focus to MF to lock it off.
03 CAMERA SETTINGS
Go into the Manual (M) mode on your Canon EOS camera and open the aperture to its widest setting – this was f/4 on our Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS lens. We then set the shutter speed to 15 seconds and boosted the ISO to 1600.
