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How To Properly Shoot Landscape Night Photographs

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Shooting landscapes during the night can make for a stunning photo. Our eyes can see the night sky in great sensitivity – we can look at the stars and even see the Milky Way if the conditions are right. DSLR cameras, however, have even greater abilities than our eyes and can produce night photos with fantastic details of the night sky. These photos can be achieved by using the advantages of DSLR cameras like high ISO capabilities, fast aperture lenses and long exposures. But shooting night landscapes does not come without its challenges – noise and shallow depth of field (DOF) issues.

Shooting landscapes in during the day has an huge advantage when it comes to exposure settings. Low ISO means high quality, low noise and high dynamic range photos. Small aperture settings gain us large DOF, and the shutter can be set to almost any speed we want creating short or long exposures. When shooting at night, we have less control over the settings and some are almost pre-determined to allow enough light to reach the sensor.

A Reminder: Meteor Shower for North America Tonight Friday-Saturday

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While we’re usually given a fairly early warning on when to expect an eclipse in the sky, or a meteor shower in the middle of the night, this is a pretty different situation. According to NASA, there’s a meteor shower headed our way late tonight – Friday- into Saturday Morning; the shower itself has never been visible to us before. It’s an entirely new swarm of meteors; remnants of a comet called the Camelopardalids.

NASA’s Video Of The Lunar Eclipse Will Make Sure You Wont Miss The One In October

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Last night, a lunar eclipse came into fruition above us and the moon took the color of Mars. Living in Dallas, Texas, I was lucky enough to have a clear, cloudless sky so that I could see it for myself. All over North America, many others got to share the experience as well. #bloodmoon became a trending topic on both Instagram and Twitter, and people were genuinely excited to go outside and witness a wonder of the universe we live in.

But there were also many of you that didn’t get to see it. Maybe you had work, maybe you forgot, or maybe you just didn’t care. So here’s a video from NASA’s broadcast of the eclipse itself, from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Make sure you play it in full HD, and full screen; there’s good reasons why I didn’t embed you guys a weak 360p link here.

Photo Breakdown – Amazing Star Trails Night Exposure

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Over the last few years I was obsessed with macro work. I decided to take a short break and experience/experiment with other forms of photography. I had a short (and enjoyable) period of underwater photography which ended abruptly when I introduced my beloved 60D unprotected to the ocean (not as enjoyable). After that unpleasant experience, I decided to stay away from large water habitats and expand my horizons by driving off to the desert and shooting the night skies (pun totally intended).

Shooting An Ode To While My Guitar Gently Weeps

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In 2006 the Beatles released a new album – Love. It was pretty weird considering John was long dead, but after some googlling I realized that it was a new reworked version of some of the songs made by the band’s original producer, Sir George Martin. It was based on the bands already exiting recordings, demo tracks and bits that never made it to any of their prior albums.

One of the songs (track #22) is an acoustic version of While my guitar gently weeps, written by George Harrison, where Eric Clapton joins the band (AFAIK the only time where anyone ever joined a recording by the Beatles). For me this song is even better than the original track (please no flame wars on this :). If you know the story of Harrison, Clapton and Patti Boyd you know how touching it is to hear those two guitar legends play together.

Back to now, I have 18 versions of this song. It is just one of these songs that everybody loves playing. I love it too. This is why I wanted to create an image for this song based on the immortal line “I look at the world and I notice it’s turning While my guitar gently weeps”.

The general idea was to shoot a Star Trail photograph with a guitar player in the foreground of the frame. This idea has been bouncing in my head till a sketch was entered into my sketch book. Well, it stayed in the book for a while till my exams were over, and then it was time to play.

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