What to do when you meet a leopard after sunset…

Every problem is a fact plus a judgment.

Low light might be regarded as a ‘problem’, but it depends how you look at it:

• First of all, there are a few things you can do to make sure you’re making the most of the available light.

• Secondly, low light conditions often provide gilt-edged opportunities to take great shots, for instance at sunset.

• Thirdly, you can often ‘rescue’ a shot taken with a high ISO by using Topaz DeNoise AI (or even Sharpen AI).

Make the most of what you’ve got

Light is obviously critically important to photography, so it’s vital that you make the most of whatever light you happen to have. It’s no good complaining about the lack of light if you’re not even shooting wide open or your shutter speed is 1/2000 of a second or your ISO is only 400!

I take most of my photography trips to Africa where the light during the day is usually very bright, but that still leaves me frustrated when I’m on an early morning game drive before dawn, and all I can do is watch the shadowy shapes of the animals passing by.

The same happens when I’m on a night drive. It’s all very well pointing a spotlight at an owl, but it’s no good if there isn’t enough light for me to take a picture of it!

So what can you do?

To begin with, let’s just cover the basics:

• Make sure your settings are spot on. It’s very easy for buttons on a camera or lens to get knocked accidentally, so make sure your Vibration Reduction/Image Stabilisation is switched on. Most lenses have two settings: one for ‘normal’ use when the photographer is stationary and one for occasions when the photographer is moving, for example when you’re on a boat.

• Concentrate on good camera technique. Wildlife photography often involves using very long lenses that magnify camera shake, so make sure you do everything by the book:

  • Check that your lens is well supported (with a bean bag, say), and hold it firmly with your left hand while pressing the camera body against your forehead with your right.

  • Breathe like a sniper! Even normal breathing might be enough to generate camera shake, so try taking a deep breath, letting it out halfway and then holding your breath while ‘squeezing the trigger’.

  • Take a few ‘bankers’ and then work your way down the ISO scale. If the animal is not mobile and you have time, take a few shots at your ideal (but noisy) settings and then slowly reduce the shutter speed, say from 1/1000 of a second to 1/60 of a second in one-stop increments. You can then review all the images on your laptop later and decide which one has the best combination of sharpness and lack of noise.

  • Take plenty of shots in each burst. It’s often the shutter speed that’s sacrificed in low light situations, but you can improve your chances by simply taking more shots. Look at it this way: if you think you can only get one out of five images sharp with your longest lens, then don’t just take one shot! Try taking two or three bursts of five shots and picking the best one later.

If you’ve already done all that, then you have four basic options:

1. Use a wider aperture

2. Use a longer shutter speed

3. Use a higher ISO

4. Use negative exposure compensation (if the scene is darker than 18% grey)

If you’re a wildlife photographer, you’re probably shooting wide open already, but you might be able to change the other settings without compromising the quality of the image. For example, do you really need to use 1/1000 of a second if the lion is asleep…?!

Our ‘default’ settings are usually based on the ‘default’ conditions, but ‘default’ is irrelevant in low light.

As a result, you need to make sure that you’re not making life hard for yourself by basing your exposure settings on general averages. As John Maynard Keynes (or Paul Samuelson, or Winston Churchill) once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

If you’re taking a portrait rather than an action shot, then a slower shutter speed is perfectly acceptable, and cameras are generally much better in low light situations than they used to be, so 1600 or 3200 is not really such a ‘high’ ISO these days.

Finally, have a look at the scene. As I’ve written elsewhere, negative exposure compensation can allow you to ‘cheat’ your ISO a bit lower.

Manufacturers ‘tell’ their cameras to expect the world to be an 18% grey tone, but that isn’t always the case.

If the scene is darker than that, then you’re perfectly within your rights to underexpose by a stop or two. If you’re shooting in Manual mode with Auto ISO, that will mean that the ISO will automatically fall accordingly.

Compromise carefully - and as a last resort!

But what if you’ve already done all that?

Unfortunately, you’ll have to compromise, and that can be very hard.

All you can do is compromise carefully and intelligently, bearing in mind that noise is much better than blur: you can reduce noise in post-processing, but motion blur is usually there to stay.

Assuming you’re already at your maximum aperture, that will generally mean shooting at a higher ISO than you’d like, but just make sure you only compromise as a last resort. In the meantime, there’s one trick you can try.

If you’re shooting a group of animals and think you can’t shoot at f/4 or f/5.6 because you want a decent depth of field, try using ‘focus stacking’.

All you have to do is take a few shots at your maximum aperture, focusing on the eyes of each animal in turn. You have to keep the composition as similar as possible, so use a tripod if you can, but the big advantage is that you can now shoot wide open.

When you combine the shots later in Lightroom or Photoshop, the faces will all be sharp - and your ISO will be much lower!

Low light opportunities

After all that doom and gloom (literally!), let’s focus for a moment on the good things about low light. What types of shots can you take more easily when it’s dark?

Sunset and sunrise

There are some wildlife photographers who maintain that you shouldn’t even bother going out on game drives except at sunrise or sunset.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, and I once saw four male lions take down a Cape buffalo when the sun was right overhead, but it’s certainly true that the light is a lot better during the ‘golden hour’ just after sunrise or just before sunset.

Blue light is scattered more than red by atmospheric particles, so when the sun’s light has to travel the furthest through the atmosphere (at sunrise and sunset), it has a warm, reddish cast that is perfect for photography.

Your job is to capture those moments with your camera, and the good news is that you don’t have to worry too much about your settings.

Shots like the one above show the animal in silhouette against a bright sky, and that happens naturally as the camera tries to achieve the mythical ideal of 18% light reflection.

The sun and sky are so bright that it has to lower the exposure over the whole image (if you’re using an automatic exposure mode or Auto ISO), and that conveniently turns the animal into a silhouette.

I did actually underexpose Horn of Africa by one stop, but it would probably have looked just as good without that.

If you want to take this kind of picture, just make sure you set up early.

Most of the safari destinations in Africa are near the equator, so the sunrise is usually around 0630, and sunset is usually around 1830.

All you need to do is find a spot where the horizon is relatively clear of trees or undergrowth and then look for a suitable subject to photograph - ideally something with a recognisable silhouette such as an elephant or a giraffe.

I’ve been on quite a few game drives with Paul Goldstein, and he regularly sets up for a sunset shot.

The key here is to find a patch of ground that gently slopes up in a westerly direction towards the setting sun.

That makes it much easier to position the animal against the sun and/or sky.

The only other thing that might be important is your depth of field. If you want the sun and/or clouds to be sharp, then you’ll have to make sure you have a narrow aperture such as f/16.

Slow pan

Paul Goldstein taught me the slow pan when we were in Spitsbergen taking pictures of the seabirds off the bows of our cruise ship, and he’s obsessed with the technique.

He thinks it makes a much more dramatic action shot, and, to be fair, he has a point. Originality is very important when it comes to the act of artistic creation, so it’s worth experimenting.

It’s not an easy shot to master, but it’s worth it when it comes off.

The sharpness of the head set against the blur of the legs or wings makes the animal appear much more dynamic, and you can get some amazing effects from the blurred backgrounds - if the shutter speed is slow enough, you can get beautiful, creamy streaks of colour.

The only problem is that your hit rate is going to be pretty low!

Anyway, what does all this have to do with low light photography?

Well, in Africa at least, it’s often ‘too bright’ to take a slow pan shot.

There’s so much light that you might run up against the aperture limit for your lens and/or camera (f/36, say), or you might have to set the ISO manually and switch to Shutter Priority mode.

You can always use a polarising or neutral density filter, I suppose, but who can be bothered to do that?

The solution arrives with low light.

If it’s dark, then you don’t have to worry about the aperture or the ISO any more. You can simply choose the settings you want and focus on taking the best pictures you can.

I’ve written a recent post covering this subject, but the point here is to recognise the opportunity when it comes along.

When it gets dark or it’s an overcast day, try spinning that shutter speed dial and practising your slow pan.

Low key portraits

I took a colour shot of a hippo in the river at Grumeti Serengeti Tented Camp in Tanzania in May 2019. It was quite a good shot, but it was missing something.

It was only when I underexposed it by a full three stops that I got what I wanted!

A low key portrait like this shot of a hippo can be very moody and powerful, so it’s worth looking out for those opportunities when the light is fading.

If you want the shot to be dark and brooding, then you don’t need to worry so much about your ISO level: you can simply use a few stops of negative exposure compensation instead.

In an ideal world, I’d have underexposed the original shot in camera, but - hey! - I’m not perfect…

How to fix it in post

Making sure you get it right in camera is, of course, the ideal situation, but life isn’t always like that.

There are some occasions when you do your best, but your best is just not good enough.

When you find yourself in that position, and your shot is just too noisy, one program that you might consider getting is DeNoise AI from Topaz Labs.

(I’m actually an affiliate, so please click here to buy any of their editing products, including DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI and Gigapixel AI. You’ll get 15% off if you use the discount code nickdale15.)

DeNoise AI is by far the best noise reduction software on the market, and they’re constantly updating it. The most recent release made it much, much quicker to save the processed file in either Sharpen AI or DeNoise AI, so that helps no end when you have a lot of files to edit.

Whether you’re using Sharpen AI or DeNoise AI, all you need to do is drag an image into the main window and then choose your settings. Both programs offer default sharpening and denoise settings, but you can easily play around with the sliders to find the ‘sweet spot’ between sharpness and noise reduction.

You can also use a ‘mask’ to work on just one area of the image, say a noisy background.

If it’s more convenient to your workflow, you can also right-click on any image in Lightroom and choose ‘Edit in’ to edit it in either of the Topaz Labs programs.

When you apply your changes and choose a file format, you’ll automatically be returned to the Lightroom library where you’ll be able to see the sharpened and/or denoised version of your image.

You can then export it as normal. Job done.

Conclusion

Shooting in low light doesn’t have to be a problem. If you’re struggling to use your ideal settings, then make sure your camera technique is top notch and then compromise on whatever you think is least important.

If you take enough shots with a slow shutter speed, then you’re bound to get a few keepers, and there are also techniques such as focus stacking that might help.

There are also lots of opportunities for great photography in low light situations, particularly at dawn and dusk. If you’re taking silhouette shots, then who cares about the light levels…?!

Finally, if nothing else works, then I thoroughly recommend Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI from Topaz Labs.

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

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