Night Landscapes are some of my absolute favorite pictures. I really like taking night landscapes. And it’s very, very simple to set up this camera for this type of shot. You just need to think a little bit about what’s going on in your picture.
One, your ISO should be set to 100. With night landscape pictures, you have a very long shutter speed something like 10 seconds or even 15 seconds. So, you need to keep your ISO at 100 to maintain the smoothest color possible. Go ahead and press the ISO button right here by your index finger, go up to 100, and press Set.
Okay now, outdoors, if you’re in the city and it’s a lot city lights, you may want to actually keep your White Balance at Tungsten. Press the WB button right here to change your White Balance and move this to the appropriate setting.
In this case, I’m going to assume this is a city escape. So, I’m going to go ahead and use Tungsten because I know that’s going to get me the street lights and city lights as close to neutral or white as possible. So, go ahead and press Set. Now, with the ISO set to 100 and the White Balance set Tungsten were set in that respect. Now my mode, I need to change this from P to M. So, take your Mode dial, move that to M for Manual. And this will allow us to set both the shutter speed and the aperture.
Now, in this case, you absolutely have to use a tripod because we’re using a very, very long shutter speed. Go ahead and use your dial to change that shutter speed, let’s go with 10 seconds. And your aperture should also be set very, very small so press AV button. Hold that down. While you’re holding this button down, move the dial to increase the F number. That way, the aperture opening will be smaller and everything in the picture will be on focus. Because we’re using a tripod and a very long shutter speed, we can allow ourselves to use a very, very small aperture or a large F number.
So, once this is set up, your ISO is set to 100, your White Balance is set to Tungsten, you can go ahead and compose your image the way you like it. But before taking the picture, I’d recommend setting the Timer Mode. The Timer Mode is right here. Press the left navigation button to access the Drive Mode and move over to the two-second timer, press Set.
The two-second timer allows you to press the Shutter button and let go of the camera so that it stops shaking before the picture is taken. For most people, this is really good enough. You don’t need to do anything else to prevent the camera from shaking. A two-second timer will allow you to release the camera, let it settle down and then the picture is taken once the camera is still.
However, with DSLR cameras, you have a mirror in here that needs to come up before the picture is taken. In that action of the mirror coming up before the picture is taken, it may cause the camera to shake very, very little. So, if this is something that bothers you, you can remedy this by going into the menu and choosing the third set up option. To select the custom functions; go ahead and press Set.
And the Custom Function you’re interested in is number 9. You can see also up here number 9 is selected. Just use your left and right navigation buttons to move between the different functions. Once you get to 9, press Set, go down to Enable, press Set and then press Menu to escape, and Menu again to escape the main menu.
Now, what Mirror Lockup does is it allows you to press the Shutter button all the way just like you would be taking a picture and the mirror will flap up. Now, once that happens, you can no longer see your image in the View Finder. Once the mirror is up, you can press the Shutter button again all the way. The two-second timer will be activated, you can release the camera at this point, let it settle down, and after two seconds the picture will be taken.
Remember, once you’re done taking your pictures, you need to go back and disable the mirror lockup so it doesn’t do it with every single picture so press Menu, press Set to enter the Custom functions. It remembers where you were last at so press Set again, go up to Disable, press Set to disable the mirror lockup and then you can press Menu to escape.
Now, this is something that you’d very frequently want to access because like me night landscapes are pictures that you like to do very, very much. You can actually save that mirror lockup feature in you’re My Menu tab. If I go over to the My Menu tab, you can see that mirror lockup is located right here and I can very easily access this. Hit Set and then choose whether to enable or disable this feature. Press Menu to go back and Menu to escape. Once everything has been set up, your mirror lockup is enabled, your timer is set to two seconds, your aperture is set to a high number such as F18 or even F22, your shutter speed is set to 10 seconds. You can press your Shutter button halfway, focus on your subject and press the Shutter button the rest of the way. If the mirror lockup is enabled, go ahead and press the Shutter button again. The focus will be maintained. If it’s not enabled, go ahead and press the Shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.
To find out much more about digital photography and your digital camera, go to LBGuides.com.
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