Available Light Travel Photography Tips
It doesn’t matter what you call it—available light, unavailable light, available darkness, or low light photography—often the most rewarding photographs are produced when working under challenging lighting conditions. Why?
First, there’s the thrill of overcoming the ever-present technical obstacles that prevent you from producing a well-exposed image under challenging lighting conditions. Second, photographs made under lighting conditions different from the classic instruction sheet admonition of “f/16 and the sun over your right shoulder” have a more eye-catching look. Third, since most travel photographs are made during the middle of the day, taking the time to search out other times will let you produce photographs that are different from the rest of the pack’s.
1/50 sec at f/3.2 and ISO 2500
One of my favorite tips for photographers who are traveling is to make a different kind of photograph each day. When I’m home I take a three-mile walk around a nearby lake and always take a camera because I never know what I’ll encounter on my walk. When I’m traveling, I take a similar walk at night because scenes, like this one at a mall near my hotel in Albuquerque, which looks completely different at night than it does during the day. I captured this image handheld, assisted by the Olympus E-5’s in-body image stabilization. To make it look even more different, I used Oly’s Pop Art mode to punch up the color adding a touch of unreality. © 2012 Joe Farace
To make successful low light images you’ll want to start with a combination of fast lenses and ISO settings often combined with a slow shutter speed. Unlike using film, digital SLRs can be set to record images at a number of different ISO speeds at any time and there’s also no problem with color shifts caused by reciprocity failure as there is with film. While you can always shoot at ISO 200 speed for available light photography, especially when using a tripod, you’ll probably want to bump up your camera’s ISO settings when the light is low. How much will be determined by how much digital noise—that’s exacerbated by slow shutter speeds and high ISO settings— you can tolerate.
1/2000 sec at F/8 and ISO 400
While its long since a cliché that you should always have a camera with you, sometimes you just don’t feel like lugging a digital SLR and a tripod, no matter how lightweight they may be, around all day. When the sun gets low on the horizon, I swap my SLR for a point-and-shoot camera like the Leica D-Lux 2 that was used to make this image on the beach at Acapulco near sunset. And while this camera does produce a little noise at the ISO 400 used to make this photograph, it’s mostly noticeable only in the boy’s white shirt. Exposure was in Program mode at 1/2000 sec at F/8. © 2012 Joe Farace
Continued on Tuesday…
