Blue Pixel

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 by Reed Hoffmann

Photography's all about light, and people often talk about "available light" photography. In photojournalism we often called it "available dark," a joke about how little light there often was. Quite honestly, though, I'm a big fan of available dark photography.

Photography’s all about light, and people often talk about “available light” photography. In photojournalism we often called it “available dark,” a joke about how little light there often was. Quite honestly, though, I’m a big fan of available dark photography.

I’m drawn to scenes where the subject is in light and the surrounding area is darker. There’s hardly a better way to get that than shooting at night. The real trick to working with low light is managing your shutter speed. You need to keep it fast enough to avoid blur from either your movement of the camera or subject movement. That can mean raising the ISO. If your subject’s not moving, then a tripod can be your best friend.

To illustrate this I’m going to use some photos from my recent trip to Egypt. The first day there we went to the Great Pyramids in Giza. That night we returned for a sound and light show. We’d been warned we couldn’t bring tripods, but took our cameras anyway. After all, we’re photographers :-) Arriving, we discovered there was a small cafe at the back that had a slightly elevated patio. We paid the extra fee to sit there, where we had a wall we could set our cameras on. Voila! Instant tripod! Using camera bags and our self-timers, we were able to get some pretty good shots. For the one of the pyramids and the laser show, I used an exposure of 1/2-second at f/4, ISO 2000 with a Nikon D700.

Near the end of the trip we headed out into the desert southeast of Cairo. There are two unique sections of desert down there that we wanted to see. After a full day exploring the Black Desert in four-wheel-drive jeeps, sunset found us arriving at the White Desert. Wow, what an amazing area. Covered with white rock formations, it’s truly a spectacular place. As it got dark we stopped for a Bedouin dinner by candlelight. With a full moon overhead, the rocks looked like they were made of chalk. Finishing dinner, I grabbed my tripod and walked about ten minutes away from camp, to one of the more unique formations. I was shooting 30 and 60-second exposures, and at one point noticed movement off to my right. Glancing over, I saw a small desert fox running past. As desolate and hot as the desert is during the day, we’d been told it supported a rich ecosystem. This shot was done at ISO 200, 30-seconds at f/5.0, again with the D700

When I heard singing from the camp, I knew it was time to return. The Bedouin were putting on a concert by the fire. There wasn’t much light, but the D700 excels in low light situations. While it goes up to about 25,000 ISO, I chose to set it only to 6400 for the shot of the performers. Again on a tripod, I shot at 1/4 second at f/2.8. That slow most pictures were blurry, but a few, like this one, came out well.

Egypt was a great trip, and as usual, some of my favorite photos were done in available dark. All you need is a tripod and a little imagination.