Evening pictures

By Adrian Toon, director of A2n.

The nights are rapidly closing in and the temperatures are dropping, but while we still have some greenery on our trees, the time is good to take that elusive evening picture of your project.

For those of you with an SLR camera, all you need is a good sturdy tripod and a compatible ‘shutter release’ for your model. Setting the camera up on a tripod, framing your subject and not forgetting to focus, we then move to aperture.

Try to use the ‘sweet’ area if you have a zoom lens, which is usually the middle of the lens’s capability – possibly f8 or so. Moving to shutter timing, it depends on the time of the evening, but try several settings up to 30 seconds or so on a very slow ISO setting of 50 or 100, this will help reduce the ‘noise’ in the image. Experiment and you will be rewarded with some excellent images.

For those of you using phone cameras, there are some excellent ‘clamps’ for phones which attach to tripods. Try using the built-in apps on auto or, better, use an app that allows manual control of the camera’s settings and follow the suggestions above.

The time of evening which is best depends on the project, but if you aim for the time when the outside light starts to match the artificial light indoors, should be very good.

The key here is to experiment – each project and camera is different so find out what works best for you!