Night photography

Night is not dark. A city at night is a room lit by hundreds of small, hard, coloured sources, and the reason the pictures look the way they do is that nobody balanced them. Sodium orange, LED white, fluorescent green and neon red all land in one frame at once.

The tripod is the second half. A thirty second exposure at f/11 records a street more brightly than the eye sees it, and it also records time: the cars become lines, the water goes flat, the crowd thins to ghosts, and the lamps burn past white into flare.

Say the exposure and the aperture: fifteen to sixty seconds at f/8 or f/11, on a tripod. Say what the long exposure does, such as car trails or flat still water.

Name at least two light sources of different colours, and say they stay unmatched. Sodium orange against LED white is the common pair in a modern street.

Protect the shadows. Say deep black shadow with no fill, and say the lamps clip to white and throw a flare star. Those two facts are what stop it looking like a lifted evening picture.

Use it for a high street, a petrol station, a car park, an underpass, a harbour, a lit building, a wet road after rain.

Leave it alone when people have to be sharp. Anybody who moves during a thirty second exposure disappears or smears.

Astrophotography needs no artificial light at all and treats the sky as the subject. Night photography wants every lamp in the street, and it fails in a dark sky reserve.

Street photography after dark stays handheld at 1/60 and wide open, so the people stay sharp and the frame stays grainy. Night photography puts the camera down and lets the people vanish.

Cinema publishes Blue Hour, the twenty or thirty minutes after sunset when the sky still holds colour, and it publishes Silhouette as a lighting entry. Night photography starts after blue hour ends and the sky goes black.

Sodium street lamps put an orange cast over European and American cities for about fifty years, and they gave the genre its colour. The rollout of white LED street lighting through the 2010s cooled the streets down and split the palette, so one frame now holds warm shop light, cold LED and green fluorescent together. CineStill 800T is popular for this work because the film has no anti-halation layer, so every bright lamp bleeds a red halo.

The shadows come back open and grey, with detail in every corner. Say deep black shadow with no fill, and say only the lit areas carry detail.

The colours come back corrected to one neutral white. Name the sources, name their colours, and say they stay unmatched in the frame.