How to Take Night Shots
Welcome back to Gear Daddy. I’m Daddy Troy. Today’s topic is taking night time photos of your kids specifically using sparklers, glow sticks, flashlights, as well as how to take some ghost images, so let’s start with the camera, there’s not a camera lessons here. I'm just going to show you two things, number one, you’re going to put your camera in the manual mode. You see that I have it on M right here. You also want to learn how to set the shutter and the aperture once you are in manual mode. And finally the last thing, a little pop up flash on most cameras, sometimes you’re going to use the pop up flash, that’s it.
Let’s start with some images from my kid’s birthday party. We held a glow in the dark party. And as party favors, we gave away the glow in the dark necklaces and wrist bracelets. And through fashion, the kids ended up twirling them so we decided to separate it a little bit, trying to keep the safety on. The first shot right here, you see that I have the flash off, and I let the shutter open for two seconds which is enough time for the kids to go as bunch of revolutions around with one of the glow sticks.
I really like this image because you can see the banding, the different colors, and it kind of reminds me some sort of model, the atom or the orbital mechanics. In this image I also left the shutter open for two seconds, but I use the flash in order to freeze the subject and then left the shutter open while he twirled it around. In this next, I also used the flash in order to freeze the subject, then I left the shutter open for two seconds and the kid did really a cool butterfly pattern.
Let’s move on to sparklers and sparklers are really, really bright so you don’t need to leave the shutter open for very long. And what I really liked about this is this seemed to me really closely. She was really still except for her arm and that was pretty important to the shot since I didn’t use a flash. You can see another one of her here turning it around as well as the sparks, flying out in a centrifugal fashion. This next shot, I turned the flash on again in order to freeze the kid in place. And then, right when the flash went off, I moved the camera to the right. This neat little trick I learned from a friend of mine Chris Caselli, right when the flash goes off, then you moved the camera away, and as a result, you get the streaking across the image.
Here’s another night where I took my kid out and I gave him the control of the camera, you’ll see me right here in a ghost image. My son left the shutter open for 13 seconds and the flash is on and it captures my image and then I walked out of the scene and as a result, you see this ghost like image of me. Here is one of my son’s, he had a great time taking these pictures because he would find the most complicated place on the playground. He would push the flash, leave the shutter open and then continue to capture light and really had a good time.
And here’s an example of painting with light, it’s a really fun exercise with the kids in which I'm going to leave the shutter open for a long period of time, this time 13 seconds and he moves the flashlight around throughout the frame. Similarly, as a headlamp, and so we put it on his head and I asked him to hop to his right, our left, as he hopped along, it does this neat little sinusoidal curve start to form.
And finally, our favorite shot at night. We spend a long time working on this shot. My son began off in a distance in the grass. And for 10 seconds, we left the shutter open, he ran toward this bike rack, docked underneath it, crawled on his hands and knees and kept crawling at a straight fashion out of frame. And it makes it look like a lightning bolt that comes and goes through the bike stand.
Well, that’s all for this Gear daddy. If you have some pictures you’ve taken with your kids at night, let me know at info@dadlabs.com so that I can share them over at dadlabs.com. I also want to give particular thanks to BabyBjorn for allowing us every week to creatively go out and so stuff with our kids and then come back and tell you all about them hear at dadlabs.com.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services