The ultimate guide to night city photography

 

Urban night photography can be hugely exciting. When done well, the resulting images often yield stunning patterns of colourful, swirling streaks and hotspots of light.

Unfortunately, when done badly—as it often is—the results can be rather depressing dark streaks, with here and there an occasional flare of colour and light. 

So how do we get it right? That's what this article is going to be all about: making the most of opportunities to photograph city nightlights. Let's get stuck in and get you on the road to producing some stunning images.

 

Setting the scene for city photography at night

Let's start by defining what we mean by city nightlight photography. 

The techniques described in this article cover almost everything with photography of streets and buildings at night, from views of entire city skylines down to close-ups of single lighting displays or even less. 

So, it has quite a wide remit, just as long as it's urban, the sun is below the horizon, and the main focus of attention is on the lights. 

Having established what we're aiming to shoot, several basic techniques and tools will be with you through most, if not all, of your city nightlight photography. These are:

• a tripod
• a flashgun
• shooting with some natural light in the sky

Let's look at each of these in a bit more detail.

 

1. A tripod is essential

Light levels are quite low during nighttime, even in an urban setting bathed in artificial lights. 

As a result, exposure times will be long (and hence shutter speeds slow) even if the lens aperture is wide open. If the latter is closed down to any degree (to increase the depth of field), the shutter speeds will quickly become even longer.

The only way to reduce those long exposure times is to increase the ISO or sensor's sensitivity, but doing so greatly reduces image quality, making it self-defeating. 

It will also make some creative techniques (described below) impossible to achieve, reducing the quality of your photography. 

So, stick with a low ISO (about 100), enjoy the use of long exposure times, and embrace the power of a good tripod.

 

2. Shooting night city photography with natural light in the sky

If you're photographing a close-up view of a single lighting system, say an advertisement or nightclub sign, then this doesn't apply.

However, for any wider shot that includes even just a fraction of the sky, it is far more effective to shoot while there is still some light in the sky, i.e. in the later stages of dusk, before it gets completely dark.

Many people new to this kind of photography wait for total nightfall before starting to shoot, but it is not a good way to go for several reasons. 

Firstly, having some light in the sky will generally put in an additional splash of colour, perhaps some pink or violet, which further increases the interest in the image. 

Waiting until it is completely dark will render any sky almost completely black, except for any artificial lighting that radiates upwards, rendering an important chunk of the image blank and lifeless. 

Secondly, having some light in the sky helps to make the shapes and outlines of buildings, and any natural landscape features visible. This gives substance and context to all the lighting. 

If you wait until it is completely dark, there is a good chance that all those outlines will be invisible. This weakens the sense of an urban setting and leaves all that artificial lighting simply 'floating' in the enveloping darkness, devoid of its architectural context. 

This latter point is particularly important when photographing in small towns and cities. Waiting for full nightfall in such a place will quickly demonstrate just how little artificial lighting of interest there is. 

However, picking on a particular building or set of buildings at dusk can often result in something quite dramatic and effective, even when there is only a limited amount of artificial lighting around.

Related: The essential features of every digital camera 

 

3. Keep the flashgun in your bag

There is often a temptation to use a flashgun extensively in city nightlight photography, thinking it will add a crucial bit of extra light. Most of the time, it is useless and may have a harmful effect on your images. 

It is particularly pointless when shooting distant views of large urban skylines. 

Many people make the mistake of firing a flash whilst pressing the shutter button as they're pointing their camera at a brightly lit nocturnal urban skyline. 

The little flashgun on hand-held cameras can't illuminate an entire skyline, some of which may be a couple of miles away. It's especially difficult to achieve this with a shutter speed that is fast enough to hand-hold the camera.  

Even a quality flashgun struggles to fire its light more than 15 metres into the darkness. Instead, get that tripod out for skyline shots, mount the camera, put the flashgun away, and use a long exposure that grabs all the light available from those buildings.

Even when shooting street scenes, it is usually not worthwhile using a flashgun for the same distance reason. If you come close to some lighting, they may need to be more powerful for the flashgun to compete, rendering it pointless.

A flashgun is useful when you need to throw some light onto elements within a scene that are not getting any light (or not enough) from the street lights. 

This may include foreground cars (parked or moving), people on the street, or in markets or festivals. This is particularly so if they are backlit by all that lighting but have no light falling on the side facing the camera. In this situation, a flashgun is needed. 

 

Subject matter, composition and exposure

As already mentioned, the subject matter for city photography at night can range from wide vistas of urban skylines to close-ups of single-light displays, with everything in between. 

Urban night photography down in the streets may or may not include people. Still, when taking photos of cities at night, they are usually simply part of the urban scene, adding context and activity to the street view and its lights. 

Remember that shutter speeds are generally quite slow, so they blur moving people, which can help add a dynamic atmosphere.

Furthermore, they will generally appear lighter than the lighting if they are really close to and fully bathed in the lighting. Adding a fill-in flash will allow some people in the scene to be captured sharply and well-exposed, which can sometimes be useful. 

However, because of how our brains are wired, those caught by the flash tend to become the subject of the image rather than the nightlights around them. 

Photography of traffic, both moving and static, can be extremely effective. Static vehicles, composed in the best way, can give superb reflections of any nearby lights, greatly enhancing the dynamic life of a street scene and simultaneously hiding the generally unattractive tarmac road surface.

Moving traffic produces images containing wonderful streaks of light, something that we'll cover in the next section. 

Water is also a very useful component in photos of cities at night, both for street scenes and wider urban skylines. 

For the former, it is remarkable just how effective it can be to catch the reflection of nightlights in a well-placed puddle, again greatly increasing the area of the image covered by colourful lights and minimising the unattractive tarmac. 

For cities that sit beside a large body of water, whether a lake, a large river, a harbour or a beach, viewpoints that show not only the buildings and their lights but also their reflections in the water can give stunning results. Always look out for these possibilities.

Exposing correctly for all this lighting can be challenging and is often a delicate compromise when photographing cities at night. 

Assuming that the city nightlights themselves dominate the scene within your image frame, then, in general, the camera's exposure meter will expose those lights more or less correctly. Any small unlit areas within the frame will be very dark in the final image, which is often desirable as you want to focus attention on the lights. 

However, suppose your image frame contains large unlit areas, such as the sky after total nightfall or unlit buildings. In that case, the exposure meter will start for them, giving them longer exposures to lighten those dark patches. 

As a result, the nightlights will be over-exposed, often resulting in parts of the image burning out. To compensate for this, under-expose the image, over-riding the camera's exposure meter to give a shorter exposure time or narrower lens aperture than the meter wants to set. If shooting in automatic or semi-automatic mode, do this using your camera's exposure compensation facility. 

Even when the camera does expose correctly, there is often such a vast range in the intensity of lights in a scene that a small amount of burnout occurs in those areas affected by the brightest lights. 

This is sometimes a necessary compromise to ensure less bright lights are exposed correctly, giving an overall lively, vibrant and colourful image.

The lights within a scene may also vary significantly in colour temperature, something the eye may not notice but could have an important impact on the images. 

Mostly, today's cameras handle this well, provided the white balance control is set to automatic (AWB). The one area that might cause trouble is when a scene contains a large amount of old-style fluorescent lighting. 

These are usually rich in a green light, which can look awful in your images. You can correct this in most image editing programmes by adding in some magenta. However, remember that this will also affect the colour temperature of all the other lights in the image, so tread carefully.

Related: How to photograph on cloudy days

 

Creative techniques for night city photography

There are several beautifully effective creative techniques applicable to city nightlights photography, and these are:

 

1. Light streaks of moving traffic

This is the most commonly used special nighttime technique. Light trails created by moving traffic can turn a fairly uninteresting road view into a magnificent, dynamic stream of colour and light. 

It's most effective with traffic moving away from the camera. Since it reveals the red taillights, you need to set the camera up on a tripod at a good vantage point, usually (though not necessarily) higher than the road, and use exposure times of several seconds as traffic flows past. A single vehicle passing during the exposure can generate a useful image, though it's often a lot more effective with a stream of vehicles.

 

2. Rotating a zoom

You can create a dramatic and abstract image simply by using a wide-angle zoom lens and then turning the zoom ring during the exposure. 

The result is an image containing streaks of light zooming in while retaining the original scene's basic appearance and structure. It's essential to turn the zoom ring very carefully to avoid camera shake.

 

3. Total defocus

Completely defocusing the camera on the scene will turn a literal view of the nightlights into an abstract artistic image consisting solely of a mix of soft 'blobs' of colour. Clearly, you need to turn the autofocus off first for this to work!

 

4. Time-lapse photography 

Finally, a mention of time-lapse photography, which can apply to a wide range of photographic genres and subjects. In city nightlights photography, it can result in a much sped-up view of an urban scene, with traffic moving fast, lights going on and off, and colour/light in the sky changing. 

The results can be truly dramatic. Make sure to set the camera up on a sturdy, stable tripod in a location free from traffic vibration. Remember that a 10-second time-lapse clip will need 250 exposures, so allow plenty of time!

 

This blog was written by Nigel Hicks, a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel Hicks runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these go to www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work, feel free to take a tour of the website at www.nigelhicks.com.