Setting up the camera for Night Landscapes or Night Scenery pictures is really pretty simple. There are couples of things you can do. One thing set your mode dial to night scene right there, the star with the person. And this will allow you to select night scenery as one of the options. Go ahead and press set, and now what’s going to happen is the ISO is set to 100 and you can’t change that which is great. However, the white balance is set to automatic and this may not be so great. A lot of times, street lights and city lights are tungsten and very yellowish, and so in auto white balance setting you won’t be able to compensate and your picture may come out very yellowish.

Another thing the shutter speed and aperture settings may not be quite as you want them. You can fix that pretty easily by pressing menu and moving over to the creative night portrait option press set, and now I can set my aperture to something a little bit more narrow so that everything is in focus. I can just use my dial up in the front to set a narrow aperture. Now everything will be in focus and I can go ahead and take my picture.

These options are really not bad alternatives but if you want a lot more control of your image you should use the manual mode and it’s really not that difficult. Go ahead and move your mode dial to M for manual. This will allow you to set both the shutter speed and the aperture. Now you want to select a very, very slow shutter speed so go ahead and use the dial up in the front right here to move your shutter down to about 10 seconds.

Now you just press the dial in like a button to select your aperture in this too you should set to something that will allow you to get everything in focus make sure that the ISO is also set properly. You want to be using a 100 ISO no higher than 100 with long exposures such as 10 seconds you want to use the lowest ISO possible, so press the ISO button right here and move that down to 100 and then press set. Make sure your white balance is also set properly press the WB button. You can change the setting to affect the overall color in the picture. Since most street lights are tungsten I’m going to stick to this and just go with a standard neutral colored picture, press set to escape.

Now my white balance and ISO are properly set. My shutter speed is set to 10 seconds which is great, and my aperture is set to F10 which is also just fine.

Another thing you want to keep in mind when using a long exposure is you have to use a tripod obviously, you will not be able to hand hold 10 seconds and they highly recommend using the timer mode or the remote release cable if you have one. If you don’t have a remote release cable, go ahead and use the timer mode that will work just fine. To set that use this drive mode switch up here and move that down to timer just move this all the way down to timer.

And now available in the quit menu is the timer function, so just press the quit menu button right here and move over to the timer function and go down to choose two seconds, go ahead and press set. Now like with any picture, focus on your target, press the shutter button halfway, recompose the image, lock down the tripod so the camera is not moving and then press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture, and immediately you want to delicately let go of the camera so it has those two seconds between the time that you press the shutter button and the time that it takes the picture to relax and stop shaking. Again, a remote release cable will allow you to avoid using the timer mode and will make it so the camera doesn’t shake at all, let the timer mode seems to work just fine as well.

To find out much more about digital photography and your digital camera, go to LBGuides.com