Canon Camera Museum

Taking Good Handheld Photos at Night

Darkness is kryptonite to your photos--all cameras thrive on light. As the sun sets, your camera craves slower shutter speeds (which lead to blurry photos) or demands the flash (which creates harsh lighting up close and does nothing for subjects that are farther away). I've given you some advice for dealing with low-light situations in the past. Recently, a few cameras have emerged that try to solve this problem with fancy handheld low-light shooting modes. This week, let's see how to achieve similar results with your own camera and the photo editing tools on your PC.

You already know the problems associated with taking pictures at night. Traditionally, most cameras do little to help. The problem is one of physics: In low-light situations, the camera has little alternative but to leave the shutter open longer to soak up more light.

But consider a camera like the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS and the Sony Cyber-Shot WX10 . Both of these cameras offer night modes--with names like Handheld Twilight and Handheld Night Scene--that work sort of like panoramic stitching or high dynamic range features.

When you take a picture in these handheld night modes, they don't take a single shot but rather a series of them, very quickly, each with slightly different exposures. All of these photos are then automatically combined and optimized into a single, (hopefully) well-exposed photo that looks like you took a long-exposure night shot.

You probably already know some tricks for getting good night photos. You can increase the ISO, use a flash, or lengthen the shutter speed (which generally requires a tripod). But you've probably never tried something like the Sony's Handheld Twilight trick. So can you replicate something like that yourself?

Sure you can. There are all sorts of ways you can take a photo you shot in low light and improve it afterwards on your PC. In fact, I've got three techniques you can try.

If you have already taken a photo at night and the result was somewhat dark and underexposed, one way you can improve it is with your photo editor's Levels tool , as I've explained in the past. Open the photo in your favorite photo editor and choose the Levels or Histogram Adjustment tool. Grab the slider under the right side of the histogram and drag it towards the middle. As you do that, you should see the photo get brighter, improving the exposure of your photo.

Retro Thing: Canon Camera Museum

The Canon Camera Museum is a virtual showcase of Canon's film and video past. The museum is divided into four sections: Cameras, Design, Technology, and History.

If you've ever wondered about a particular model, this is your opportunity to find out when it was made and what its specifications were. Sadly, the pictures are a tad on the small side -- I was hoping that Canon would make decent hi-rez images available for viewing. They are an imaging company, after all.

It appears that their first magazine advertisements included photos of a wooden prototype because the famed Kwanon wasn't ready in production form. It soon became a profitable reality thanks to a little optical help from the company that later became Nikon.

Canon's virtual camera museum (Canon)

If you've ever wondered about a particular model, this is your opportunity to find out when it was made and what its specifications were. Sadly, the pictures are a tad on the small side -- I was hoping that Canon would make decent hi-rez images available for viewing. They are an imaging company, after all.

It appears that their first magazine advertisements included photos of a wooden prototype because the famed Kwanon wasn't ready in production form. It soon became a profitable reality thanks to a little optical help from the company that later became Nikon.

Encyclopedia of 20th century photography

The Lazarus project

HWM

Brandweek

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