Introduce New Dimensions Into Your Street Photography at Night
Easy to apply strategies to improve your night street photography — with examples
Many people have a negative relationship with winter. It’s cold, dark, and days are short. Getting outside requires dressing for 25 minutes first. De-freezing upon return a hot beverage. Outdoor meeting? Only possible for a brief time. Drink on the terrace? Forget about it.
Also, there are just not that many people out during winter. However, there’s a silver lining: street photography at night. With morning daylight starting after 7 and evening darkness inbound just after 4, you get many hours of darkness to practice your night street photography.
Here are a few reasons to go outside, withstand the cold, and shoot nighttime street photography.
Mood
At night, the world becomes different. Busy streets are less crowded. Distractions disappear, things slow down. Different stories come to life. Behavior changes. Busy areas become silent. People concentrate around main traffic hubs. In some ways, they are more predictable, in others, they are not. You get to take time and choose your narrative.
In the darkness, the stories you create can be mysterious, evoking questions, dream-like concepts, or anxious-feeling, even. You can let the viewer be unaware of the surroundings, bringing them close to your subject and leaving the rest for their minds to wonder.
Composition
As someone who enjoys clean, minimalistic photography, shooting at night is a blessing. My work is so much easier! Things I don’t like, I can hide in the shadows. Focusing on framing, carefully placing my subject in the correct position and light, leaving everything else behind. You can do the same.
Street signs, adverts, people, traffic, all of that can be left out of the frame. Provide the viewer fewer distractions and your image more of a story.
Light
If not anything else, the best thing about street photography at night is light! Observe how street and window lights cast shadows on the floor. Look at how the light changes every time the cars pass by, and how it comes back to what it was before. Look at different intensities of light and what role it plays in your image. Observe how people interact with light, how their bodies form these mysterious silhouettes. Notice, how different their faces are when they step outside of shadow and into the light.
With daylight in the winter months so short, you get to experience sunrise and sunset hours more often. After all, it’s much easier to get up at 6.30 to photograph during sunrise at 7am. Or to leave work early to catch the last rays of the setting sun at 4.30pm. The time before sunrise or just after sunset provides magical, soft, muted color tones, which simply make any photograph better.
Sure, the reasons to photograph at night are clear. We get great contrast, light, and mood into our shots. How do you approach shooting at night, and what creative ways can you explore?
Photograph light
When I go out at night, the very first thing I always look out for is photographable light. I then look at how light forms the environment around it. These may be street lamps, shop windows, illuminated signs. Once I find it, I look for behavior happening around the light source. Are there people walking by? Do they interact with the light source in any way? Is the light constant, or does it change? After I’ve observed the place for a while, I’d look at what the possible composition might be. Where do I need to stand to capture the light to tell my story? The most important thing is to take your time, observe and be patient.
Show motion
From a technical perspective, making photos at night is tough. There is very little light available. Your option to resolve this issue is to work with the exposure triangle. To get more light onto the sensor or film, you can:
- raise the ISO
- lower the aperture
- slow down the shutter speed
Raising the ISO will get you somewhere, and so will lowering the aperture. When you push these two, you either introduce more grain into your image or the harder it is to get things into focus. When you slow down the shutter speed, your shots may get blurry.
Intentionally slowing shutter speed will introduce artistic elements into your photography and street scenes. You can embrace the blurred-out images, camera shake, and light trails. Combining these may lead to interesting new depths and dimensions of your storytelling. Don’t be afraid to experiment with these ideas.
Many modern cameras have perfect in-body image stabilization which helps get the shot. Even better, use a tripod. This way, you’ll get to frame your image perfectly, take your time and make the best possible image.
Shoot through things
The following applies to any time, day or night. One of the best ways to advance your street photography is to introduce internal framing into your compositions. Your primary frame is the whole area of your image, edge to edge. This is the field of view you work in. To draw the viewers’ eye to your subject, you can use internal framing. Find something to shoot through and place your subject within the “artificial frame”.
To introduce mystery, you may want to make the viewer wonder about what is going on behind the given frame, or even outside of the primary frame. You can do this by only showing a part of your subject — hands, legs, or gestures.
Here are a few ideas to choose from: shoot through windows, doors, lamp posts, cars, trams, buses, or tubes windows. Get creative with internal framing and shoot through people — a triangle below someone’s hand, or through an “A” shape between someone’s legs and the ground as they walk. Another way to utilize internal framing creatively is to chase light and color. Think deep shadows, a silhouette against a bright part of an image, or a specific color placed in the frame to isolate the subject from its other parts.
Shoot into the light
Finding great light is the first step in my night street photography process. Depending on what the light is, I decide my approach to it. One of the ways I use very often is shooting into the light and placing my subject in front of it, oftentimes nearby, so the subject is illuminated, too. There are two options with this approach — either expose for the subject or expose for the highlights (this is what protecting your highlights mean).
If you expose for the subject then you’ll use the backlight as the main source to cast light onto your subject. This is very often used in films and it gives the pictures a movie-like quality.
If on the other hand, you opt for “protecting the highlights”, meaning setting your exposure so details in highlights are visible then usually a subject placed in front of the light source becomes too dark to identify — hence creating an illusion of a silhouette.
Bring the ISO up
Today’s modern world is full of microchips, amazing sensor technology, capable of providing the cleanest images in the toughest conditions. In such a setup, the pictures may feel “too digital” for some.
It’s interesting to watch the rebirth of film photography and I believe this is partly happening because everything else in our lives is becoming digital. People yearn for nostalgia, the analog process, things done the old-fashioned way. Moreover, the film pictures have that wonderful soft grain and amazing colors, depending on which film solution you choose.
At the same time, shooting at night requires increasing the ISO. If you shoot digital, embrace this opportunity and bump that ISO up. You may tune it back down in post-processing, however, you might find the grain adds to the mood of your work. You may even continue working this way in the future.
Play around with multiple exposure photography
Night time is perfect to explore the effects of multiple exposures. There is just something magical about putting more exposures onto one frame. You can go about doing this in multiple ways.
You may want to shoot light first and subject second. You may want to repeat a pattern over in your frame. You may want to overlay a sharp frame with a blurry one. You may even want to zoom in on your first exposure and zoom out on the second. You may want to create multiple layers of cityscapes or landscapes. You may want to shoot negative space in the first frame and fill it with light in the second.
With multiple exposures, you may want to give yourself the freedom to do crazy, innovative, out-of-the-box things!
If you want more inspiration in the best possible form, check out multiple street exposures at Tom’s Instagram account, under @bewaremyfuji
Go abstract
Many photographers struggle at night because they feel their images are technically not perfect. If you don’t have the latest and greatest gear, capable of shooting at extremely high ISOs with lenses that now open below f1.0, and usually cost close to a Honda hatchback, you’ll consider your shots inadequate.
Try doing something different next time. Embrace the limitations of your gear and work it into your images. Shoot lights, out of focus, multiple exposures, shapes, reflections, or shoot through things. Look for light play, search for things that are different at night. Combine these elements and create abstract pieces of art.
Easing the pressure leads to creative freedom, which is, after all, what we all want.
Have fun and stay safe
In case you read all the way down here, you’ve likely found one or two things worth considering. Now it is up to you to go out, have fun, and try them! While you do, make sure to stay safe, know the area you are spending your nights in, or go out with a photographer friend. It might be nice to grab a drink after your film rolls are spent and cards are full.
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