Mice007's blog

Many of my visitors asked me to write about the blue hour or night photo shooting. So let’s see:

You need a camera (I’m using digital camera so I’ll focus on this in my guide) a good and strong tripod and of course a good place to take photos. 

The camera

The three most common types are compact, bridge and DSLR cameras. I’m not going into this more detailed but if you’re interested here is an article about this. All bridge and DLSR cameras are capable of blue hour and night shooting.
If you have compact type, you have make sure it is able to take 6-8 sec long exposures (night photography picture mode or with manual controls) and it has some exposure correction capabilities. Last thing is not a must, you can do it in a photo editor later but you’ll lose quality. Also there must be a setting to completely turn off the flash unit, it is not needed.

Today I took some sample photos to show you the difference between a photo at the end of the sunset, a photo during blue hour and a late blue hour (almost completely dark) photo. I also took a photo with phone to show my setup. It is nothing fancy or magic as you can see.

Taking the photo

So when everything is ready and you’re in time then find the correct composition. Always take attention to the whole picture, not just the center. Decide what you want to include in the photo, try to avoid all poles close to you, trees, or bright light sources. These can ruin your photo easily. If you checked the main subject, and all four corners then setup the exposure. The best if you have manual controls so you can set the aperture around f7-f10 and the exposure time around 1-5 seconds with a low ISO (100-200). Use the exposure meter in your camera to find the exact values depending on the actual light level. The right value is between -1EV and -2EV. If you don’t have manual controls just setup exposure correction to -1.5EV and take a test photo to see the results. If you find it too bright then apply -2EV or if it is too dark then -1EV but keep in mind the LCD screen of your camera is not really accurate.

Examples

Below you can find three examples. I took all photos in the same day, the first picture is about 10 minutes before and the third is about 20 minutes after the middle blue hour shot. So as you can see the right timing is a must to catch the best photo, this is why I created bluhour.com. 

In my next post I’ll write about the photo editing to make images really nice and stunning.

Drop me a comment if you liked this post or if you have any questions.