To optimize your camera for night landscape pictures, I highly recommend not to use the scene mode. I will show you why in a little second, but instead using the manual mode. And I know that seems a little bit scary, but it is really quite simple. I will show you exactly how to set everything up in a second.

First I will show you if I turn my mode down to SCN for scene and in the back choose night scenery for a night landscape, I will press set. basically it will optimizes the camera, but if I am in a low light situation such as a night landscape and take a picture, this mode may choose to use an ISL with 800 to compensate for the luck of light.

The problem with that is 800 will inch with this a lot more image noise than I want in the picture, and with night landscape I will really should be using a try pad to allow for a slower shutter speed. So if I can have a slow shutter speed I do not need to increase the ISL, so instead of using this mode, turn your mode dial to manual and this will allow you to do is set both the aperture and the shutter speed.

So, since this is a landscape after all, what you want is a very small aperture to get everything in focus. So use your quick menu joystick to adjust the aperture settings, it is something a little bit smaller. FH should get everything in sharp focus, then I will move over to the right to adjust my shutter speed.

Now I am using a try pad so I can use a very long shutter speed, so I will go down, slow down my shutter speed to about 10 seconds. I can keep going down up to a full minute, with my experience 15 seconds is really all you need and 10 seconds is usually enough.

But it really depends on how much light is in your situation, so now I have my shutter speed set and my aperture set, I want to keep my ISL at 80 to maintain the smoothest cleanest image possible, press the quick menu button hold it down for a second to the get the menu. And move over to white balance, I do not want auto white balance because street lights are usually very yellowish so I want to compensate to that and go down and choose halogen. This should make up for the yellow cast from the street lights.

If your ISL is not set to 80, just move over to the right and move up and down to adjust the ISL to 80 and go ahead and press the quick menu button to escape this menu. The last thing you want to do is to set the 2 second timer, the way you do that is by pressing the left navigation button right here, and go down to choose 2 seconds. Press set to okay, the reason why you want a 2 seconds timer is because you are using a try pod and you want to release the camera before the picture is taken and give it a second to stop shaking so the camera is perfectly still before capturing the image.

So you have 2 second timer selected, now just as with every picture, press the shutter button half way, focus on your target, recompose the image, lock down your try pod, press the shutter button the rest of the way, and the camera will way 2 seconds, enough time for you to release the camera. And to give a second to stop shaking and then I will go ahead and take a picture.

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