Night and Low Light

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When dusk falls on Paris, darkness seldom follows. The City of Light lives up to its name and puts on a dazzling display for the benefit of visitors and Parisians. It would seem that practically ever building of note is floodlit and the lights are on in the many twinkling bars, clubs and restaurants long into the night.

What this means for the photographer is that light levels are high enough for handheld street photography - if you have the right equipment. In this case, it means a high ISO and/or a fast lens of f1.4 or thereabouts.

This is where newer digital SLRs score over “digicams”. The latter are highly capable but, generally-speaking, produce much “noisier” images at levels above ISO 400. Nikon’s D3 and D700, Canon’s Eos 1Ds Mark III, 5D MK II and Eos 40D, and the likes of the Sony A900, are all able to produce low light photographs that far surpass even the best of the fast 35mm films when it comes to issues of noise or grain.

Many cameras also boast some form of image stabilisation nowadays that can make the use of shutter speeds as low at 1/10th sec. possible without a tripod. Fast lenses are really the domain of the DSLRs. Most digicam zooms are quite slow in comparison with the prime lenses available for SLRs. All things considered, a DSLR is the way to go if you’re serious about your night and low-light photography. A DSLR at ISO 1,600 and a 50mm f1.4 lens can be handheld quite comfortably at 1/30th to 1/125th sec. on the city’s streets.

If you’re intent on using black and white film - well done if you are! - to capture Paris streets after dark, I’d recommend the tried and trusted combination of Kodak Tri-X rated at ISO 1250 and developed in Diafine. Not only does this combination produce images with tightly-controlled grain but the “two-bath” developer also goes someway to preventing the build-up of highlights, such as street lamps, to a stage where they become detail-less white in the file or print. Fast black and white films, such as Fuji Neopan 1600, Ilford Delta Pro 3200 and Kodak T-Max P3200, are alternatives if you’re looking for conventional or lab development.

The use of a tripod is, of course, usually necessary for longer exposures of the kind sometimes needed to record more detail in the shadows. It’s sometimes possible, however, to get sharp results by jamming the side of the camera against a vertical support or resting it on a wall. The biggest difficulty to overcome is the huge contrast range between the deep shadows of unlit doorways and side streets and the glare of the floodlights. In daylight photography, an empty dark shadow is usually to be preferred to a burned out highlight so exposure should be biased towards the lighter tones. At night, however, the reverse applies. Dark shadows are permissible-even desirable - and over - exposed lighting, so long as this is restricted to relatively small areas such as lamps and reflected highlights in, for example, glass, is fine.

If shooting on a tripod when the destination of the photograph is an inkjet print from either a digital file or scanned film, it’s possible to take two photographs - one biased towards the shadows and another the highlights - and combine them in Photoshop or similar. Some software such as Photomatix and Artizen will do this automatically but it’s easy enough in your image processing software. If you want to explore this further, here is a good place to start. This site contains lots of information and links to free software that should get the job done.

Shooting in colour at night presents some difficulty when it comes to accurately recording the various hues of street, flood and shop lights. Digital cameras have a variety of settings falling under the heading of colour balance to take account of these different light sources. The default setting is normally auto colour balance where the camera tries to reproduce the colours as accurately as possible. This works better in some cameras than in others. Other colour balance settings usually include adjustments for clouds, shade, flash, tungsten and fluorescent and more.

Many cameras have a “raw” file setting that records the information in the photograph exactly as it fell on the sensor. If you use this setting, then colour balance can be easily adjusted in image processing software. All of the colour balance settings can be used, one after another, to find the one which gives the most accurate colours for the scene photographed. Most photographers, however, shoot on the jpeg setting in which case the scene is recorded along with the camera’s interpretation of colour balance. This makes it much harder to improve it at the image processing stage if the colour balance was off to start with.

If you’re shooting jpegs and want to do some night or low light photography, I’d recommend finding the best colour balance setting on your camera before you start. Take a shot of the scene and run through the various colour balances until you find the one that produces the best colours. As a guide, tungsten lights reproduces with a strong orange hue and has to be cooled down, floodlight can taken on different colours but is sometimes a bit like the camera’s flash and needs to be warmed up. Fluorescent records with a green tint and that has to be compensated for as well.

If you have mixed light sources in the photograph then you wont be able to record them all accurately and will have a decision to make. Personally, I tend to leave fluorescent lighting alone as night scenes can often have a monochromatic look to them and a touch of green adds some desirable colour!

If you’re new to Paris, why not take the 8p.m. sightseeing trip with Paris Charms and Secrets? Travelling on an electric bicycle, you’ll be given a great introduction to the city’s illuminated delights from an English-speaking guide.

Copyright © 2008 Paris Travelogue

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