Exposure, Noise, and Other Technical Mumbo Jumbo

First, let’s get into camera settings. Though I feel that photography is 90% about perception, 9% about where you stand, and 1% about camera settings, the settings are the first thing we do before going on to the other 99% of the act. So, how do we set the camera optimally for night street photography? Well, it’s not much different from daytime (at least the way I do it) but the night leaves a bit less room for error. First, I generally always shoot in Aperture Priority (if you prefer Manual, that can work too, but that’s a discussion for another day). The reason is that it leaves the metering, that is, the selection of exposure, up to the camera but allows me control of the aperture, which is very important for two reasons: 1) it affects depth of field, and I want to be in charge of that, and 2) it allows me to let in more or less light depending on the situation.

First, a bit about metering modes. Generally, all cameras let you choose between an average metering, spot metering, and some options in between. At night, I highly recommend avoiding spot metering, and in my experience the wide/average/matrix (every camera calls it something else) metering modes are much more reliable. The reason for this is that at night in the city there are many extreme changes in the brightness of subjects, such as spotlights, car headlights, deep shadows, etc. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to land the spot on one of these things and get an exposure that’s way off from what you intended.

Having said that, even on the average metering mode, the camera can be thrown for a loop by those aforementioned bright or dark spots in a given scene. It’s important to learn how your camera ‘thinks.’ Well, the first thing to realize is that it doesn’t think at all, it’s actually quite dumb. There is no fancy AI predicting how to expose a scene. The camera just wants to end up with an average brightness that equals a certain preset value. So, you can try to predict how it will behave. If you point it at a scene that’s mostly very dark, the camera is likely to overexpose (and vice versa for very bright subjects).