Shoot at lower ISO settings

If your camera is three years old or newer, the ISO functionality will be great. You shouldn’t see too much noise creeping into your images, even up to ISO 1000. However, there might still be some noise at the higher ISO numbers, so be aware of your exposure. Shooting at a lower ISO means you will have less noise in your image. Higher ISO settings tell your camera’s sensor to group pixels together to capture more light. This grouping effect can make your image look gritty and noisy.

So, how do you avoid shooting at a high ISO? If possible, open your aperture to its widest setting i.e. f/2.8. If you are shooting in low light, use a tripod if possible, or you could use a flash. If none of these options give you the correct exposure, then you will need to push the ISO up higher. Also, do some test shots to find out at what level the ISO settings on your camera start to degrade image quality. For many years I shot on a Nikon D80 and I knew that anything above ISO 500 was really difficult to use afterwards. This was because the noise became difficult to remove, even in third party software, and if it was removed, the image looked like a watercolour painting as a result of over processing of the noise. So I got to know the limits of my camera and worked within those constraints.

Shoot in RAW format

I know you may feel daunted by shooting in RAW, but you don’t need to be. RAW is a great way to get the best out of your images, so be sure to use it. You don’t have to shoot RAW all the time, but when you notice that the light is becoming a little too dark, switch over to RAW. The reason is that JPEG images already have compression applied to them. This means that there is already some noise, and what is known as JPEG artefacts, in the image. If you are using a high ISO with JPEG files, the noise can become even worse. Also, in post-production, you have much more flexibility removing noise, and increasing exposure, with a RAW file than a JPEG.

Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw has some powerful noise reduction tools

Check your exposure

When digital cameras first hit the market, they were really bad at rendering highlights correctly. Many photographers (myself included) would slightly underexpose the images in order to retain detail in the highlights. This meant that the shadow areas were really dark and when you tried to pull them up in Photoshop, the noise would become evident.  This has been largely sorted out now and the new generation of digital sensors does a great job of handling highlights and shadows. As a result, you can expose correctly without fear of having noise in the shadows, or problems in the highlights. In fact, you can now overexpose slightly so that the shadows are a little brighter than normal and then you can pull the highlights down in Photoshop. I have been doing this for a while now and it is amazing how much detail the new sensors can capture in the highlights. Be careful not to overexpose too much, watch that you don’t clip the highlights as the details may then be lost for good.

Be careful when doing long exposures

Long exposures make some of the most dramatic images, but if the exposure is too long, the sensor of the camera can begin to heat up and the pixels will render incorrect colours and exposure. You can still do long exposures, but again, be aware of how you camera handles the long exposure time. Does the image look too grainy? Test it out and experiment to see where your camera begins to struggle. Then make sure that you don’t shoot a long exposure for longer than whatever works on your camera. The key point here is to know the limits of your gear and shoot within those limits. This will ensure great images and easy image editing.

Long exposure images can accentuate noise in a scene

Use in-camera noise reduction

In most cameras there will be a function called High ISO Noise Reduction or Long Exposure Noise Reduction. It’s a good idea to turn this on if you are shooting at a high ISO or doing long exposures. The reason is that after the image has been shot, the camera will analyse the image and look for any pixels that are incorrectly rendered. It will then fix the pixels that are not properly rendered. This takes some time, usually as long as the exposure time. So if you shot an image that was 30 seconds long, the camera will do an analysis and correction that will take up to 30 seconds. This may become impractical if you are doing 10 minute exposures, but it is worth doing on shorter exposures. If you have the time, do it on the very long exposures too, as it can improve the image quality.

Nikon D3300

1. Crank up the ISO. The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the camera’s sensor is to the light that is reaching it. The additional noise that is generated by using a high ISO can be filtered out somewhat in post-processing. Sometimes the extra grain adds a little something special to the shot. Shooting in RAW format allows for the most flexibility in post-processing.

2. Use a larger aperture. The larger the aperture, the more light is entering the lens. Shooting at f/5.6 lets in more light than shooting at f/18 (remember, the lower the number, the larger the aperture).

3. Slow down the shutter speed. More light is captured the longer the shutter remains open. Keep in mind that a good rule of thumb for clear hand-held shots is no slower than 1/60 of a second. Use a tripod if you’re shooting at anything slower than that, though I have had success at slower hand-held shots using lenses with image stabilization.

4. If you do have to use a flash, try to avoid the on-camera pop-up. It tends to flatten the appearance of the image because the light is hitting the subject directly. Invest in an off-camera flash, angle light so that it is not directly in front of the subject, and use reflective surfaces and diffusers to soften the light. Strategically placed constant light (such as tungsten lamps using soft white bulbs) work excellently for providing additional ambient light without sacrificing the atmosphere of the setting.

5. Use your camera’s exposure compensation capabilities. The scale on many of today’s DSLR’s allow from -3 to +3 stops in 1/3 stop increments (my 7D is +/-5). Dial the exposure compensation to the positive side to purposefully overexpose the photograph.

Set your camera on a tripod well away from the spin, and use Manual mode with an aperture of f/8, an ISO of 100 and a shutter speed of around 30 seconds.

Nikon Compatible Lenses for Night Photography

Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G – The best night & landscape photography lens currently made.

Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF Autofocus Lens – Another great wide angle lens.

Nikkor 16mm f/2.8 Fisheye

Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 – Fantastic wide angle lens at a great price.

Rokinon 35mm f/1.4

Megapixels (MP), which translates to “one million pixels,” dictate how much detail your camera’s sensor can capture.  The higher the megapixel number, the more potential detail can be captured within an image.

• Put the exposure and focus on manual setting.
• Start with a 30 second exposure.
• Use the largest aperture you have. F2.8 is nice. F2 is better. Whatever you’re largest aperture is, use it.
• Crank your ISO up as high as it will go. Don’t worry about the digital noise you might get at a high ISO setting. (We’re not painting the Sistine Chapel here; we’re trying to impress kids and dinner guests.)

Choose the place where your camera is going to go. You can do this with the lights on. A tripod is best, but as I said, a table or even the floor will work.

Films with lower ISO numbers are known as slow, or less sensitive to light; films with higher ISO numbers are faster, or more light-sensitive. When using a film camera, it's pretty typical to shoot with ISO 100 or 200 film in normal daylight, and use ISO 400 film for lower-light photography

Shutter speed is the length of time your camera shutter is open, exposing light onto the camera sensor. Essentially, it’s how long your camera spends taking a photo. This has a few important effects in how your images will appear.

When you use a long shutter speed, you end up exposing your sensor for a significant period of time. The first big effect of shutter speed is motion blur. If your shutter speed is long, moving subjects in your photo will appear blurred along the direction of motion. This effect is used quite often in advertisements of cars and motorbikes, where a sense of speed and motion is communicated to the viewer by intentionally blurring the moving wheels.

Aperture is a hole within a lens, through which light travels into the camera body. It is an easy concept to understand if you just think about how your eyes work. As you move between bright and dark environments, the iris in your eyes either expands or shrinks, controlling the size of your pupil. In photography, the “pupil” of your lens is called your aperture. You can shrink or enlarge the size of the aperture to allow more or less light to reach your camera sensor.