6 Tricks To Take Night Photos With Your Mobile
There is no doubt that our mobile phones have ceased to be mere anecdotal cameras, designed to get us out of trouble, to become the kings of photography throughout the world thanks to a very remarkable resolution, sharpness and quality. They also have applications and connectivity technology that allow us to share images wherever we are.
But when light conditions are no longer optimal, things get complicated. Having low light demands a lot technically from the sensors, and also demands a lot from us as photographers.
Here you can learn nude photography techniques
How To Take Night Photos?
In this article, we will provide you with a few tips and tricks to improve our photos when the sun goes down and we have few or no light sources around us. There are six recommendations that will make the photos more spectacular and with higher image quality.
You can also activate the dark mode on your smartphone for these types of moments, which will help you to have a better contrast with the scene. If for whatever reason the photo has gone wrong, you can also pixelate the image online, so that the result is incredible.
Use A Tripod
It is the first thing you should learn if you are going to take a night photo. As there is very little light, the photos must have a greater exposure, so if there is any movement during the time of the shot, the result will appear totally shaky. Therefore, we have to make sure that the mobile will not move at all.
But since it is not very common for us to carry a tripod with us at all times, we often have to resort to ingenuity to improvise something that simulates it. For example, if we have a selfie stick, we can use the clamp that holds the mobile as a support to rest on a bench or a car and thus achieve stability.
If we do not have that clip either, we can hold the mobile vertically by resting it on a horizontal surface and between two purses or bags. Anything as long as the mobile is pointing where we want and remains totally still for a few seconds. Which brings us to the next tip.
Shooting Long Exposure With Manual Mode
If we let the phone choose to take it at night, it will choose a moderate exposure time that will compensate with a high ISO value, which will inevitably give us a photo with a lot of noise. It does this because the mobile, in automatic mode, imagines that we are holding the phone by hand.
On the other hand, if we have it placed on some type of tripod, we can tell our mobile to take a photo of several seconds while keeping the ISO at 50 or 100, which will give us the highest possible quality. Thus, we choose the manual shooting mode in the camera app and, setting the sensitivity at ISO 100, we adjust the exposure time to a few seconds, the ones we see that we need for the photo to be well lit. With this, the result will be a spectacular night photo.
Put Your Model Close To The Lights
If we are doing a portrait, the most important thing is that this person is correctly lit. If you are in the dark, you will lose visual prominence in the photo, you will not see the details and there will be more noise in the image.
Hence, it is essential to choose the right place to put ourselves and where to place our model. Obviously, this situation becomes easier if we work in a controlled lighting space, something very accessible by following our instructions on how to set up a photography studio at home.
On the street, positioning the protagonist of our snapshot near a lamppost can help us. However, as the light comes from far above, it is easy for it to create unflattering shadows in the eye sockets. In their place, shop windows and car headlights are much better, for example, because the light source projects from an intermediate height that illuminates better. With this, we highlight and illuminate the main subject without falling into the resource of lighting using the flash of our mobile, because… We will explain it to you right away.
Avoid Built-In Flash
The flash of our mobile can get us out of trouble in which we have absolutely no light of any other type, but the truth is that it is usually preferable not to use it. By shooting the light in the same direction as the photo, it does not create any shadows, giving flat portraits without volume. In addition, its power is very limited and unable to illuminate anything more than 2-3 m away, so the backgrounds are always dark and lifeless.
Use Another Mobile To Illuminate
And it is that not using the flash of our mobile does not mean that these leds are not useful. If we have friends with us, they can use their mobile flashlights to illuminate the model in our photo at a more flattering angle, or even the model can light himself by pointing his mobile.
You can also use these lanterns to create ambient light in the room you’re in by bouncing it off a wall. All the tricks that professionals use to improve lighting, soften it or redirect it can also be applied to photos with our mobile.
For example, have you tried using a sheet of paper to increase the lighting surface? By putting something translucent in front of the lanterns, we will ensure that the light does not come from a single point and we will achieve a softer and more pleasant light.
Use HDR
It is a very widespread function among current phones and its acronyms respond to High Dynamic Range. It is a mode that you use so that both the very light parts (such as the sky, so that it appears blue instead of white) and the darkest parts look good in a photo. What it does is take multiple photos very quickly, with different exposures, and then digitally combine them into a single snapshot with more detail.
When taking photos at night, we find things that are very lit (all the bulbs) and very dark elements (those where no light reaches), so this technique makes special sense. This allows things to show up near the highlights in our photo, and likewise, combining these three photos also reduces the amount of noise that appears when using a high ISO, so the benefit is doubled.
