How To Master Low Light Landscape Photography

The challenge of low light landscape photography is mastering the technical side of working when the light is beautiful but there isn’t much of it. If your technique isn’t good you run into practical problems like focusing errors, lack of depth of field and noise. Mastering these technical issues is important because it lets you work fearlessly in the golden and blue hours, which is when you’ll make your best photos. You’ll never go back to making landscape photos during the middle of the day once you realize how beautiful the light is during the beginning and end of the day.

Other types of low light photography

This article is about landscape photography, but you can apply the techniques to cityscapes and architectural photos taken in low light. You can also use these techniques for long exposure photography. That’s when you use a neutral density filter during the day to reduce the amount of light passing through the lens. Most photographers do it on cloudy days, using exposures of two minutes or longer to blur any water or cloud in the photos (these types of photo are usually seascapes).

What these subjects have in common is that you need a low ISO for good image quality and a small aperture for good depth of field. As a result you need a slow shutter speed and a tripod to support the camera. Let’s take a look at this in more detail.

Low light technique #1: Buy a good tripod

You need a good tripod for low light landscape photography. The benefit to you is that you can use a low ISO (maximizing image quality), and a small aperture like f8 or f11 (for more depth of field).

When you use a low ISO and small aperture in low light what do you get? A longer shutter speed! Depending on the light level you’ll need a shutter speed of at least a second, and maybe longer than 30 seconds. This is good because it’s where the magic happens. These shutter speeds blur moving parts of the landscape, like grass blowing in the wind, the tide lapping against the shore or clouds scudding across the sky. This effect is unique to photography. No other medium records motion in the same way.

Let me show you how it works. I made the photo below with the ISO set to 100 and the aperture to f8. I then needed a shutter speed of 30 seconds to get a good exposure. The long exposure blurred the water, the distant figures of the fisherman and the clouds on the horizon. This, plus the beautiful light from the setting sun, gives the photo tons of mood and atmosphere.

You get a similar effect in cities and towns. The light from passing traffic turns into long streaks of light. A car passing through a rural landscape while you’re making a photo with a long shutter speed does the same. So does a plane coming into land at a nearby airport – the effect you see in the photo below (shutter speed 48 seconds).

You need a tripod for photos to like these to keep the camera steady and create images that are sharp where they’re meant to be.

The key is to buy a good quality aluminum or carbon fiber tripod with a ball and socket head. It has to be light enough to carry around with you and stable enough to support your camera and lens for shutter speeds of up to six or seven minutes. The heavier your camera and lens combination, the stronger your tripod needs to be.

My advice is to do some research and buy wisely. Spend a bit more than you would like to get a good quality tripod that lasts for many years. There are so many good brands around it’s impossible to make a recommendation. Do your research and read or watch reviews. If in doubt go for an established brand like Manfrotto. For what it’s worth, I use a MePhoto RoadTrip. It’s ideal for my mirrorless cameras, but if you a dSLR user you’ll need something sturdier.

You’ll also need a way to fire the shutter without touching the camera. Smartphone apps and remote releases have their place, but for most photographers a simple cable release is an inexpensive alternative that does the job and doesn’t rely on battery power.

Low light technique #2: Take your camera off fully automatic

If you’re using your camera in a fully automatic exposure mode, such as landscape or night scene, it’s time to stop. They don’t give you enough control over your camera’s settings.

The only exposure modes I recommend that you use for landscape or cityscape photography are Aperture Priority and Manual.

These modes give you complete control over your camera’s settings, which in fact are far more simple than you might realize. Providing you use the Raw format (see the next point), there are only five decisions you need to make:

• What focal length to use.
• Where to focus the lens.
• What ISO to use.
• What aperture to set (for depth of field).
• What shutter speed you need (your camera will tell you this).

Start by deciding which lens to use (normally a wide-angle) and frame the photo to give a good composition. Composition is a huge topic in itself, so check out my composition articles for lots of practical ideas.

Then set the lowest ISO your camera has, and a narrow aperture like f8 or f11 to give good depth of field. The shutter speed takes care of itself. The lower the light, the longer the shutter speed.

If you’re working in the evening, then keep the ISO and aperture unchanged, and let the shutter speeds get longer as the light drops. You might start off with a shutter speed of five seconds, for example, and end up shooting a six minute exposure. It’s a beautiful thing to watch as the light fades, the sky gets darker and the first stars come out. You can then compare the photos afterwards to pick your favorites.

For example, I made the photo below with my camera’s lowest ISO (200) and aperture f8 without any filters. The time was just before 10pm (the location northern Spain, so long summer days) and I needed a shutter speed of 340 seconds.

Low light technique #3: Use Raw

To make the simple approach work you have to use the Raw format. With JPEG you have to set White Balance, color profile, sharpening and other settings in-camera. But with Raw you can change those in Lightroom Classic. With JPEG you’re stuck with what you entered into the camera, plus you lose the time it takes to make those decisions.

Set White Balance on your camera to Daylight so you can see the true color of the light. Then forget about it for the rest of the shoot and concentrate on getting a great composition and good exposure.

That’s what I did with the photo below, which you can see with White Balance set to Daylight. From here you can decide whether to go with this White Balance setting, or whether you’d like to make it warmer (more orange) or cooler (more blue). All in Lightroom, so you don’t have to worry about the in-camera White Balance. Just set it, forget it and focus on the more important stuff (composition and exposure).

Low light technique #4: Use mirror lockup and Live View

If you have a digital SLR camera then use mirror lockup or Live View to eliminate camera shake caused by the camera’s mirror flipping out of the way when you open the shutter (you don’t have to worry about this if you have a mirrorless camera).

Live View is ideal to use for landscape photography. It’s easier to look at the live feed on the camera’s LCD screen than it is to look through the viewfinder. Plus, in Live View the mirror is already in the up position to let light pass through the lens and reach the sensor. Most cameras show a live histogram in Live View to help you get the exposure right.

Check your camera’s manual for the details and, if you’re new to this, then practice at home beforehand. The idea is to get to the stage where you can set it without thinking. Otherwise you’ll just waste time trying to figure it out on location.

Low light technique #5: Learn to use hyperfocal distance focusing

Hyperfocal distance focusing is one of those things that sounds more complex than it really is. Here’s a definition:

The hyperfocal distance is the closest point to the camera on which you can focus your lens and keep the horizon in sharp focus.

This point is determined by aperture, focal length and sensor size. There is also another variable involved called the circle of confusion, which is a way of numerically definining the degree of sharpness. Apps like PhotoPills (iOS and Android) calculate the hyperfocal distance for you so that you don’t have to worry about the numbers.

For example, if you use a focal length of 14mm, an aperture of f11, with an APS-C camera then PhotoPills tells you that the hyperfocal distance is 0.88 meters. That means that everything from the horizon to 0.44 meters (half the hyperfocal distance) should be sharp.

As long as your lens has a distance scale on it (some cheaper zooms don’t) it’s a simple matter to focus close to this point and maximize the depth of field. Keep it simple and err on the side of safety. In this example I’d focus around a meter from the camera rather than trying to nail the hyperfocal distance exactly.

Some mirrorless cameras (like my Fujifilm cameras) have a depth of field scale in the viewfinder you can use to set the focusing point. This is a useful tool – check your camera’s manual for the details.

Composition comes into play here. If you have something in the foreground close to the camera, and you want it to be sharp, then you’ll need to pay more attention to hyperfocal distance. You may even need to learn how to focus stack.

If all that’s too complex then fall back on the old advice of focusing a third of the way into the scene and stop down to f11. It’s a simplification of the hyperfocal distance focusing technique that anybody can use.

Low light technique #6: Avoid the camera’s smallest apertures

There are two reasons to avoid using the smallest aperture settings on your lens (f16 and f22) whenever you can.

• Small apertures give softer images. This is caused by an optical effect called diffraction, where light diffuses (spreads out) as it passes through the aperture. The smaller the aperture, the more diffraction you get. Every lens is different, but it tends to be minimal at f8 and f11, and visible at f16 and f22. The easiest way to tell – do some tests on your lens. Put your camera on a tripod, start at f5.6 and then take a sequence of photos at one stop increments until you reach f22. Then look at them at 100%. You’re looking for two things, which aperture gives you the sharpest result (probably f8) and what’s the smallest aperture you’re comfortable using before diffraction kicks in.

• Smaller apertures reveal more dust spots on the camera’s sensor. You can remove them in Lightroom, but you’ll be surprised how much easier it is when you use f8 than f22.

The bottom line is that it’s a good idea to use an aperture of f8 for most of your landscape photos. This is where most lenses give the best image quality. Only drop down to f11 or f16 if you need the extra depth of field.

Understanding how to use the hyperfocal distance (see previous point) has the added benefit of letting you use the optimal aperture setting of f8 more often. Believe it or not I made the photo below with the aperture set to f8. There was no need to use a smaller aperture as f8 gave me the depth of field required to obtain a sharp image, including the slice of concrete in the foreground.

Low light technique #7: Don’t underexpose

In landscape photography you have plenty of time to work out the optimum exposure. The basic idea is to avoid underexposure by exposing to the right. This means that the histogram pushes up against the right-hand edge of the frame without going over it. It lets the sensor capture maximum shadow detail with minimum noise, which in turn makes your job in Lightroom much easier. What you need to avoid is a gap between the histogram and the right-hand edge.

If this is new to you then check out my ebook Mastering Exposure for the details.

Low light technique #8: Don’t be afraid of Bulb mode

Regardless of whether you use Manual mode or Aperture Priority, most cameras have a maximum built-in shutter speed of 30 seconds. To make photos with longer shutter speeds you’ll need to use Bulb mode.

Bulb is straightforward to use. Start by setting the ISO and aperture. Then press the cable release once to open the shutter, and again to close it. Some cameras display the time elapsed on the LCD screen, others elsewhere on the body, or you may have to time it yourself using a watch or an app.

The benefit of Bulb is that it lets you work deep into twilight and take advantage of the magical quality of light at this time. Plus you’ll get beautifully blurred water and clouds. You can see the effect in the photo below, which I made by using Bulb mode to open the camera’s shutter for 240 seconds.

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Further reading: The Creative Assignments ebooks

The key to getting good results in your low light landscape photography is to get out there and practice the techniques outlined in this article. If you live close to a beach, lake, river or some other body of water then you’re in luck. These techniques work beautifully when there’s water in the scene.

You also need motivation, and that’s where setting yourself a brief comes in. Pro photographers work to briefs supplied by clients, but you have to provide your own. A brief is a goal. For example, you might set yourself a brief to make a beautiful blue hour landscape photo by the sea. That’s your motivation.

Another word for brief is assignment. The quickest way to improve your photography is to give yourself creative assignments. Nothing complicated, just simple ideas and goals that spark inspiration and get your creative juices flowing. Check out my creative assignments ebooks to get started.