It Was a Dark and Not So Stormy Night

by | Dec 23, 2021

Today’s Post by Barry Staver

Working under available light, unavailable light, available darkness, or low light—it doesn’t matter what you call it—can also produce some of the most rewarding photographs.

First, there is a thrill in overcoming the technical obstacles that typically prevent you from capturing a well exposed image. Second, photographs made under conditions different from “normal” have a more eye-catching look. And third and maybe most importantly, taking the time to search out dramatic lighting conditions let you produce photographs that are different from the rest of the pack.

Most photographers know the ingredients needed for making images under less than ideal lighting conditions: You can use a tripod-mounted camera with high ISO settings and slow shutter speeds to create time exposures that create images that overcome the cliché and can, if you’re lucky, produce art.

There’s the exposure challenges. Scenes that contains an extreme rage of brightness and darkness can give a camera’s light meter fits with nighttime holiday lighting being a perfect example. The human eye easily adapts to the colorful lights that are hung on buildings and trees but your camera’s meter generally reads the larger dark areas first, instructing the camera to expose for what it sees as a lack of light. The resulting image will typically be overexposed and all of the brightly colored lights will lack detail.

You can overcome this problem by taking a meter reading from an area that’s well lit by the lights. Move in close and meter it, using a hand-held meter or locking the reading into your camera’s built-in meter. You can also put on a longer lens and take a closer reading from camera position. This produces similar results without having to move in close, which isn’t always possible. Another method involves bracketing several different exposures of the same scene.

How this shot was made: Denver’s City and County Building has traditionally been illuminated at Christmas time by a striking lighting display. Because of the size of the large building, most photographs that are made of the building are made from a distance. Instead, this photograph was shot on a ledge outside a window on one of the building’s upper floors. To make this photograph, permission was asked for (and granted) and an escort accompanied me remaining throughout the shoot. A Gitzo tripod-mounted Nikon DSLR with a 16mm f/2.8 fisheye lens was used to capture the entire building. Exposure was five seconds at f/8 and ISO 400.


Along with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Barry Staver, I’m co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s available from Amazon for $22.99 prices with used copies selling for around nine bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is kind of high for some reason (not Barry and I to be sure.)