Night Sky, Yosemite Falls

Posted by Gary Hart (California, United States) on 6 February 2009 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

With any luck I'll be reprising this shot as you read this. I'm in Yosemite right now with a workshop I timed for the February full moon. I think night is the next frontier for landscape photography because of the amazing capabilities of the new digital SLRs.

While many digital photographers have already discovered the long exposure capabilities of their SLRs, I'm afraid the majority of night images simply look like daytime with stars. Night is dark and cool, so capturing something that feels like night requires a bit of underexposure (as far as your camera's concerned) with histogram skewed to the left, and a relatively cool (blue) color temperature (drag the raw processor's color temperature slider to the left). Of course the reality is by making the scene a bit brighter than your eyes see, you're actually overexposing your image, so I generally just ignore my histogram when doing night photography.

Since night shots are darker than daylight shots, distant, larger subjects usually work better than smaller more intricate subjects. Generally the best night images target something reflective like water or granite, or isolate striking silhouettes against the night sky, such as dramatic trees (bristlecone pines and oak trees are particularly nice).

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