Night Street Photography - Protect Your Highlights
Introduction
It's easy to blow out the highlights when shooting night street photography, but there is a simple solution to getting those perfect night street photos that I have used time and time again.
Let's get into it...
Rye Style
I hit the streets of Rye the other night. It's definitely tourist season, there were loads of people around. It's not so great if you want peace and quiet, but it certainly is great if you're shooting street photography.
Currently, my style is definitely aesthetically driven. Rather than in your face style street photography, I like to photograph an urban landscape, focusing on composition, leading lines, details and capture people in the scene..
Areas of Contrast
There's a lot of contrasting elements going on a night shoot that the street photographer has to pay attention to in order to get decent exposure.
If it is not quite nightfall yet and you have a potentially lit up sunset which can easily get blown out.
Window light from shops, bars, pubs and restaurants can also cause the camera to show off those dreaded highlight blinkies.
Street lights, which illuminate everything on the streets, which, in my view is the night street photographer's bread and butter, can also easily become blown out.
Everything else, the people, the walls, the pavements and the roads, etc can very easily house deep shadows, which contrasted with the bright lights and skies can put pressure on the camera's dynamic range and make it difficult to get an accurate exposure in camera.
Bracket Your Shots
There are a number of things that you can do to remediate this problem.
You can bracket your shots. In this case, you could have 3 shots, with one underexposed image, one overexposed and another one with the correct exposure. You can then blend all three exposures together in Photoshop. However, by doing this you can quite easily miss that decisive moment, as you are waiting for the camera to fire three shots instead of just that special one. But if you are not too concerned with the pose of one of your subjects, then is pretty effective.
Underexpose
The other method, which is the one that I have been toying with - is to underexpose the shadow areas of your composition whilst exposing for the brightness of the street lights, skies and lit windows.
Modern cameras these days have decent dynamic range, that allows you to pull back those shadow details by lifting the shadows in Lightroom or any preferred photo editing app.
Select your Spot metering mode to take a reading of the brightly lit areas of your scene and push the shutter button halfway and then recompose the scene.
Another method is to shoot in Aperture Priority Mode or Shutter Priority Mode, where you can easily underexpose the image by dialling back the Exposure Compensation dial or if you use Manual Mode, simply reducing the ISO so that the lights are exposed correctly, yet the darker areas are underexposed. If your camera has live view then you can look through your viewfinder or the LCD screen.
If you do not have any of these features or if you are using a film camera, then shoot with the Sunny 16 rule and then adjust to underexpose slightly.
By reducing the ISO in Manual Mode I have been able to quite easily lift shadows and bring back detail in images that are two stops underexposed.
Love Those Shadows
However, one of the beautiful elements of night street photography is that there are supposed to be dark shadows. It is nighttime. Therefore, you can keep the images looking dark. The shadows do not have to be lifted to the max. That kind of contrast can look fantastic in your night Street Photography.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are very simple solutions to working with high dynamic range street photography. Solutions that are very effective and very easy to implement.
It is never easy to work with blown-out highlights.