Microstock Techniques-Night
Night Neon Red
I took this photo with a Kodak 12 MegaPixel camera using an automatic night photography shutter setting. The light was much more dim than this effect would suggest. But the light just over the sign and inside the candy store was much brighter. I loved how the red stood out, and I loved how the “candy” temptation motif emerged as the central element.
For microstock photography, a narrow focus is better. Large or panoramic images with too much going on present difficulties for sizing and inclusion. These can be very good cut down to size for small feature shots positioned around text boxes. Getting the raw material is the purpsoe of walkabout sessions or photo excursions.
Lots of stock footage can be valuable because without unique or excessively oblique perspectives work solidly for straightforward microstock customers. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but the microstock customer and text editor will be looking to find a picture that matches the thousand words it is being placed next to.
Night sessions of photo gathering have special requirements. It pays to get some experience taking sequences at night because you grow more confident as a photographer about how certain light settings and weather conditions will work. Working with different cameras in cold or dim conditions allows ease of use observations about your cameras.
I find very cold weather and weather right after a rainy spell clears up air and renders crystalline images. Paired with light, this makes for some very good shots. But night focus photography means extra blur and people motion problems. It can take a dozen night gauss shots to get one good one. And by then your batteries are up.
Collecting this pictures inside your portfolio displays to a potential client you can operate during exterior night conditions of low light. It also challenges the microstock photographer to deliver quality images under challenging circumstances. Sometimes a lens or camera setting will render a light effect darker or lighter than the real light is.
Practice taking the shots and reviewing them gives the microstock photographer another asset: experience. Next time you pause to take a shot or put less quality into a composition, it will occur to you that the light may not come out that dark, or that the lighting or signage will render a beautiful effect inside the camera.
Night photography brings up the microstock photographer’s game. Your camera becomes your teammate. How does video work better with changing light effects? What kind of action capture an you get from faraway action versus close action versus middle distance objects or people inn action?
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