Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Night Photography (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, I started photography during thanksgiving with a Canon EOS R10 with a RF-S18-45mm F4.5-6.3 IS STM kit lens. I tried to shoot some photos during the night but all my pictures came back extremely dark and grainy.

I've read that the R10 is a crop sensor camera, which is not the best for low light photography when compared to a full frame camera, but I also read that there really isn't much of a difference these days anyways.

How can I improve my night time photography pics to make them brighter and less grainy?

Is there a big difference in night photography performance when compared to a Full Frame camera?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Well your settings that you posted are definitely your #1 problem with your lens being the next problem. Your shutter speed is way to fast for low light. You need to let your sensor get enough light and to do that at night you need your shutter open much longer. For the sky or landscapes you'll want it open for 20-30 seconds but you also need a tripod for this because movement will blur the photos. With the longer shutter you can then lower your ISO and reduce noise (grain).

For people or while shoothing hand held you'll need a bit faster shutter. When hand heldThe R10 doesn't have in body image stabilization (IBIS) so you'll want to stick with at least a reciprocal of your focal length so at 45mm you'll want to shoot more around 1/50 and I wouldn't do more than 1/30 when hand held no matter your focal length. That is if you can shoot fairly steady hand held.

Your lens is really going to hold you back for low light stuff. For night you want a minimum of f2.8 or faster (lower number) aperture. I'm sure you've heard the term exposure triangle and your lens aperture is an important part of that. For example an f2.8 lens will let in twice the light of an f4 lens. It will allow you to use lower ISO and faster shutter for the same exposure.

Learn to use the exposure meter in your camera that looks something like this -3..2..1..0..1..2..3+ As you adjust the settings the little line under the numbers will move and show the current estimated exposure with the line needing to be centered for best exposure. That way you can see what the settings do to your exposure as you change them.