Landscape Photographer

Techniques For Night Landscape Photography

If you’re wondering how a landscape photographer manages to capture such beautiful images, it takes a lot of planning, training, patience, and skill. This is especially true with night landscape photography since the dark skies and lack of natural lighting can make capturing the perfect photo even more difficult. Taking fantastic night landscape photography images requires several techniques in order to get the perfect picture. Here are some techniques that a professional landscape photographer might use when taking photos at nighttime.

To capture images of the stars, the planets, or constellations, it must be completely dark outside with no artificial light nearby. If the skies aren’t pitch black, it can be almost impossible to get the right shot of the galaxy above.
No matter what the landscape subject is, it’s best shoot it when there are clear skies overhead. This will ensure that the moon provides the right lighting and incorporating some clouds can add visual interest.
It can get cold outside at night, so a professional landscape photographer needs the right gear including clothing to keep them warm. The camera may need additional coverage too, especially if the photos are being taken in extremely cold climates.
Auto-focus should not be used when taking night landscape photography, since it doesn’t allow the camera to focus properly. The right exposure for nighttime photography newbies may require several tries before the photographer can truly capture the essence of the landscape.
In remote areas where the skies are dark, the right exposure is 30 seconds with an f-stop of 2.8 and ISO of 6400. A wide lens is one recommendation for use with a longer shutter speed to avoid star trails and streakiness.
One way to get an incredible moonlit landscape photo is to take one shot of the moon and skies above, and then one separate photo of the landscape itself . . they will both need different shutter speeds and ISO, then merge the two images using a professional photo editing software program.