Candy Cactus

Light painting is a fun and unique way to light a subject up at night using some simple items.
An LED flash light works really well for your light source, especially a flash light with a narrow beam so you can direct your light source in specific areas.
Anything transparent works well for running your light through it. I like like to use colored acrylic that you can pick up at a plastic supply store.
Just hold the acrylic in one hand and the flash right up against it and start moving the light slowly around your subject. You may have to play around with it till you get the hang of it.
Typically exposure times between 3 to 6 minutes work fine. You can use a longer time if you want the stars to trail. Set the lens opening to it's widest setting.
Go out and have fun at night!  

Powell Sunrise

Early morning & late evening light provides dramatic light when the conditions are right!

Here I woke to a nice glow. To get an even exposure I set the camera on manual mode and took a light reading from either side of the brightest area. reason for that is if I took a reading from the darkest area the sky would have been washed out due to over exposure. Same goes for the lightest area under exposure.  

Light from above

Tips for shooting lightning. To get good lightning photos requires some patience and a bit of luck!
First you will need a sturdy tripod to support your camera and a cable release to lock the shutter open by setting the dial to bulb setting. Depending on how often between lightning strikes and the ambient light their is, I usually start out with a fairly wide aperture say 4 to 5.6 on the lens setting. When using a digital camera, you can check the exposures using the LCD screen on the camera to see if your over or under exposed. You will have to set the focus to manual because the auto focus will just want to hunt with a solid subject matter. use the infinity setting on your lens to set focus and frame your shot.

Portraits at night

Photographing a person at night doesn't have to be difficult. A D-SLR will most often yield better results because one can override the automatic settings most often offered on point and shoot cameras.
For this shot of Ashley, I choose a combination of settings to get this shot.A higher ISO such as 400 to 800  setting and longer shutter speed, say between 1/30 to 1/15 sec. plus I opened up the aperture to let in more light and to throw out the background focus.
Last I powered down the flash by -1 1/2 exposure to give more of a natural looking skin tones.

Macro shot of Agave

Getting Closeup shots can be fun but tricky. First you want to see if your lens can close focus to at least a foot from your subject. Second the use of a tripod is crucial for tack sharp images under lower light conditions. Overcast skies make for soft even light. Try to use mid to smaller lens aperture settings on your camera for good focus throughout the image you are photographing. Since you are using a tripod you are able to use a lower ISO setting IE 100 to 200 for better enlargements.

Lunar Showers

Hi my name is Steve Christman. I'm a professional photographer in Albuquerque, NM. I cover a wide variety of photography subject matter. In my blog  I will be covering night photography and light painting with colored acrylic and flash lights as well as creative techniques using available light, aperture and shutter speeds.
Shooting White Sands at night. First depends what you want to achieve. For this shot of the dunes at night, I used an ISO of 400 setting on my camera for a shorter time duration. I also used wider aperture setting to keep the time short. For the foreground, I used an LED headlamp to the left side of the dunes.
Experiment using a longer shutter speed for the time also try different aperture and light source for your lighting.