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Night photography
People and places can be their most interesting as the sun goes down

We've always put down our cameras as the light fades away, shooting mainly in daylight. This is a pity, because light near the middle of the day is harsh, flat and white, resulting in the worst kind of photographs. Now, new technology open to everyone has thrown open the doors to nocturnal photography – a digital revolution that is effectively turning night into day.

In the old days, you would have needed to use higher speed film to capture as much light as was needed to register a scene, in a time that was short enough to shoot hand-held. Of course, if you’re going to shoot people and other things that move, you'll need to register the scene fast. If you're shooting still life like architecture or landscapes, you can afford to put your camera on a tripod, use the slowest film or film speed setting and let it take as long as it wants. Your building isn't going to move, or blur.

Night life
Night life can be your most interesting subject ever, for it involves people, and is therefore dynamic. Of course, it also has the added excitement that comes from roaming the streets at night, exploring the shadows of a city, and generally indulging in everything that makes the darker hours attractive to experience, and so document.

You'll need the most minimal of equipment since you have to shoot light and fast. A tripod is useless, and a flash will make you as noticeable as a streetlight in your subject's face. This is where a digital camera will change the way you see things. Instead of high-speed film, which turn horribly grainy the further you push them, digital generally has quite acceptable levels of noise. You can shoot quite comfortably at ISO1,600, and be as comfortable as if you were shooting normal daylight film.

One early pioneer was Gyula Halász, or Brassaï as he later called himself. He is most famous for wandering the back alleys and establishments of Paris through the night, and gained instant recognition with his book Paris de Nuit, published in 1933. Of course, this was done the hard way, with technology that was in its infancy. Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker streets presented a difficult technical problem. Brassaï's solution was direct, primitive and perfect. He focused his small plate camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready and fired a flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the places where he worked, it was, for Brassaï, better: straighter, more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in line with his own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer. His passion was not for the pure photographic rendition of static objects or in the split-second exposures that uncovered the interior of the moment. Rather, his aspiration was to be a kind of recording secretary to the act of living. His photographs were frank and convincing, for he secured the confidence and cooperation of his subjects, treating them as if they were actors and actresses playing their own roles.

If you want to aim for something a little subtler, you'll need all the technology you can afford. Get a digital SLR that has film speed settings till ISO1,600, if not higher. Use a fast lens – one that opens wide and lets a lot of light in, so enabling it to register the scene faster. If you must or can use flash, experiment with slow sync mode on your camera. This will balance the ambient light with that of the flash, so both your subject and background are illuminated. Normal flash will pound your subject with so much light so fast that your background will be an unapologetic black devoid of detail – not to mention your subject, who will look like a deer caught in the headlights. Remember that you are also less conspicuous without flash, and your subjects more comfortable.

Things that stay still
Architecture is so much easier. Photogenic monuments are generally illuminated, so they solve most problems for you themselves. They will probably stay still, so you can put your camera on a tripod and use the slowest film setting, getting a photo with maximum image quality.

You could aim higher, steady your tripod and point your camera straight up into the night sky. This is one area of photography where having the most basic mechanical camera today might actually be an advantage. Modern electronics are designed for speed and glory, not being kept on for extended periods of time. You'll run out of batteries faster than a shooting star crosses your frame. Pick a night without moonlight, and drive far away from city lights that will obscure the stars. The further away and darker the better. One favourite among local enthusiasts is the Jebel Akhdar, with its easy access, comfortable accommodation and 2,000m height that puts you above light
pollution, heat and dust.

Dynamic range
Just when you thought shooting through the night couldn't get complicated enough. There's such a range of lighting conditions on the streets that your camera can't accommodate all of them. Expose for the illuminated building and its surroundings will register as pitch black. The same thing will happen when you flood people with flash, or shoot landscapes that contain many times the amount of light in the sky as there is on the ground (the usual scenario). Most digital cameras have a lower dynamic range than analogue film, and neither will even get close to the range of the human eye. But there's no reason to treat digital as if it were as limiting as film.

One of the options for holding detail in the darkest and lightest areas of your frame is by shooting multiple shots of the same scene, each with a different exposure. At either end will be shots that are adjusted to the darkest and lightest parts of the scene. The ones in between will be a gradual transition, from darker to lighter, underexposed to overexposed. How many pictures you need depends on the light conditions and how your camera's sensor handles exposures. Then you'll need an imaging application like Adobe Photoshop that supports layers and transparent masks. Create a new project file and insert all your source-images as separate layers. The brightest layer should be on the bottom or background. The actual process needs to be gone into detail in another issue, but the gist of it is you'll be making a composite of all the different layers, taking details from one and substituting them for another's. Your end result will contain more detail in the shadows and highlights than would have been possible with any one shot. And you'll have to decide the level of detail and amount of manipulation you're comfortable with.

Armed with oversized digital sensors, complex white balance settings, fast lenses, tripods and the latest generation software, you'll need to head out on your own and experiment. Anything is possibly, and you can now create your own reality. The night is yours.