Night time Photography
Hello friends, this post is all about night photography and how I take photos at night and the equipment I use. Night time is a great time to go out and take pictures because a lot of creatures, including frogs are very active at night. In order to photograph creatures at night you must have bright external lighting. For lighting at night I use a Neewer CN-160 LED Light pod, and it is quite bright and works extremely well. as well as my trusty Canon Rebel and sigma 70-300mm Lens and Sunpak Tripod.
My LED Light pod on top of my Canon Rebel A Green Tree frog Illuminated by my LED light pod.
One issue that I often face while photographing frogs at night is blurriness around the skin underneath the frogs mouth.This is due to the frogs breathing. The issue is that you have to have a fast enough shutter speed to get the detail underneath the frogs mouth, while yet not having an image that is really dark. In this post I will explain to you how I get photos of frogs at night that are not over or under exposed.
The four images below show some of the issues I had when I first started photographing frogs at night, and also these problems still occurred during the day.
The first picture shows the blurriness around the frogs mouth that results from using a longer shutter speed. You cannot use too long of a shutter speed when photographing frogs because their breathing will make the skin underneath their mouth blurry. For this image I used a 1 second shutter speed with an aperture of F 29, with an iso of 1600.
The second image shows how your depth of field will be greatly limited by using your camera on Program mode. This image was taken with a shutter speed of 1/40th of a second and an F Stop 5.6 and with an iso of 1600. This goes back to what I discussed in yesterdays blog post, how depth of field is related to aperture. The higher your aperture means the less light you allow into the camera with a delayed shutter speed which will create a larger depth of field for your images, which will result in the whole Frog being in focus.
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The third image is under exposed, but it was done intentionally. To be able to see the detail of the skin underneath the frogs mouth I had to use a faster shutter speed with an aperture that was not as high as the first image. On this Image I used an exposure of 1/20th of a second with an aperture of F-18, with an iso f 1600. When shooting at night this will result in an under exposed image but don’t worry it can be lightened up in post production.
The 4th image is just the 3rd image lightened up in Adobe Photoshop. This photo has detail and depth of field that the other images lack.
These are the best methods that I have found for photographing frogs at night. I look forward to sharing more of what I learn about photography with you all.
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