We should agree that there are times when interesting objects come in a situation where we had to capture it in low-light conditions and we do not want (or cannot) use the flash. Low light photography is not that easy to do because the results are often not good especially if we don't know the right way to do it. On the other hand we want to produce images that will stay sharp without any grain and noise.

There really are a lot of objects which is interesting to be captured in low-light conditions. Objects like beautiful city view at night, fireworks, music concert in the evening or a party atmosphere will be a pity to be passed away without a camera in action. Here I am to share some tips to produce an optimum photograph in low light conditions.

Low Light Photography Tips

Use tripod or monopod to reduce camera shake. The most reliable and convenient tools to take pictures in low light environments is tripod or monopod.

If there is no tripod or monopod, keep the camera steady by using your surrounding environment. For example, leaning the body to the wall or tree and propping the camera to the stairs will make the camera more stable.

Use the highest possible aperture. If you have a largest aperture limit of f/2.8 on your camera, use that setting so that the camera will absorb quite a lot of light.

Raise the ISO until the shutter speed of camera will reach at least 1/60 (some of the newest generation DSLR cameras can use the ISO settings up to 1000 and above and can still produce a low noise images)

Activate the High ISO Noise Reduction feature in the camera to reduce noise

Or you can the tips number 5 and use a noise reduction software to reduce noise in post production phase. Software like Noise Ninja, Imagenomic Noiseware or Nik's Dfine is pretty powerful to get rid of noise in the final result of our photos. If you are using Lightroom 4 to organize your photo collections, Lightroom has a highly advanced noise reduction feature.

Use the rules of safe shutter speed limits. The rules are: the shutter speed should be larger than the length of our lens. So if we are using a 50mm lens, use the 1/60 sec shutter speed. If we use the 17mm lens, use a shutter speed of 1/30 sec.

Well then, that was the tips on low light photography.