You just landed a corker of a carp after a few weeks of blanking. You’re overcome with excitement and you find yourself in a scramble to locate your camera, weigh sling and scale. With everything set and the beast in your hands, your fishing-buddy snaps away. It all happens so quickly, and before you know it the beast swims free once again.
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January 19, 2015
If you have a SLR camera (Nikon P90) on which settings should your camera be to take nice photos at night?
January 19, 2015
Hi Gerrit, that is a great question and almost a series of articles in itself. I will elaborate more about this in future. But, let me try to explain in short. Firstly, the Nikon P90 is a bridge camera, which means that you have a fixed lens on your camera, and you can’t remove your lens to add another lens. There are two ways you can tackle your debacle – use your camera’s auto features or do it manually, the latter being a little trickier. The easiest (not the best) is to change your camera’s mode dial to its automatic setting (green camera icon), allowing your flash to pop up – and then just use autofocus to shoot. The manual option, on the other hand, is best. Simply follow these steps as guidance:
1. You need to shoot at a low aperture, between f/2.8 to f/5.
2. Use your on-camera flash.
3. Your shutter speed needs to be slow, no less than 1/45 of a second to prevent camera shake – keep your camera really-really still. A tripod will be ideal for this situation.
4. If you can’t achieve the desired effects with the first three suggestion, set your ISO to a higher setting – about 800 ISO or more.
Unfortunately, you will have to experiment with these settings to find what works for you and your camera as every situation differs.
A good trick, which I like to use myself sometimes, is to shine some additional light on the subject with a torch or a headlight. This technique works well with my DSLR, and it could work for you as well.
Nikon P90 cameras aren’t ideal for low light conditions, and your photos might contain quite a bit of noise when you increase the ISO, reason for it being my last suggestion. I hope that this was of some help. Please keep checking for new ‘fishography’ articles on a regular basis to help improve your photography. I will write a more detailed article on basic camera terminology soon, explaining things like shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc.
Hope to hear from you again soon and keep on practising.
Christelle Grobler
January 28, 2015
Hallo Christelle Grobler
Just wanted to thank you very much for the info that you sent. I was most helpfull.
Will play with the camera and send some night time photographs for you guys to see.
Regards
Gerrit
January 28, 2015
So happy you found the content useful Gerrit – looking forward to those photographs! Christelle