How to Take Pictures on Night Drives
The answer is 18%…
Dik-dik for Dinner
The word photography means 'drawing with light' and comes from the Greek words ‘photo’, meaning light, and ‘graph’, meaning to draw. You normally have plenty of light if you’re taking pictures during the day, but what about at night? It’s usually dark, so what can you do? Well, don’t despair. The good news is that with the right equipment, settings and techniques, you can still come away with some decent photos!
Why?
Dark Waters
What’s the point of taking pictures at night when it’s so much easier during the day? Aren’t you just causing problems for yourself? Well, that’s a good point, and until recently, I would’ve agreed with you. I’ve been on hundreds of game drives in Africa, but I hardly ever signed up for the night drives. I just couldn’t be bothered.
However, I began to change my mind when I realised what I was missing. It started in South Africa, when I was able to take this shot of a rhino from a hide at night (see above), and it continued when I went to Laikipia Wilderness to photograph Giza, the black leopard, who only came out after sunset…
The point is that shooting at night gives you a completely different look and lets you see things that you’d never see otherwise. By day, it’s very hard to see lions hunting or nocturnal animals like the porcupine, but I saw one for the very first time in Laikipia on a night drive!
How?
How do you take decent photos at night? That’s the big question, isn’t it? The answer is to use a combination of the right equipment, the right settings and the right technique.
Equipment
A fast lens (f/1.8)
It might mean spending some hard-earned cash, but the easiest way to improve your photography on night drives is to buy a mirrorless camera with a fast lens—in other words, something with a large maximum aperture like f/2.8.
Mirrorless cameras have electronic rather than optical viewfinders. That means you can generally see roughly what your photos are going to look like before you hit the shutter button. It’s known as What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (or WYSIWYG) and it’s incredibly useful when photographing at night because you can check the exposure in advance. I currently have a Nikon Z8 and Sony ⍺1, which are both mirrorless models.
Fast lenses help because you have to make the most of all the available light to reduce the ISO and thereby reduce noise and improve contrast, saturation and dynamic range. If your lens can only manage f/5.6, you might have to put up with an ISO of 12800 or more, but an f/2.8 lens, say, will give you an extra two stops of exposure—which means four times as much light!
Unfortunately, there’s a trade-off between the focal length and the maximum aperture. That’s because the formula for the f-value is focal length divided by the size of the entrance pupil (or aperture). The higher the numerator, the higher the f-stop.
Sure, if you have the budget to spend thousands of pounds on fast primes, it’s less of a problem, but you’ll never get a long lens with a maximum aperture of less than f/4. Wildlife photography often means trying to photograph skittish creatures from a distance, so you need long lenses, but night photography needs a wide aperture, which is much easier if you buy a shorter lens!
I do have a NIKKOR f/4 600mm prime, but I mostly use my Sony f/2.8 70-200mm lens at night. That means I have to get as close as possible to my subject—which can be tricky! On my recent trip to Laikipia, I tried to photograph the black leopard jumping across a river carrying a dik-dik in her mouth, but she was a long way away. I tried using my 600mm lens, but I ended up having to use the maximum expanded ISO of 102400, so all my photos were rubbish!
One other feature that helps with night photography is to have a lens with a constant aperture. That means you don’t have to worry about it changing as you zoom in and out. My Sony 70-200mm always has a maximum aperture of f/2.8 at any focal length, but there are plenty of cheaper zoom lenses out there that don’t offer that. Instead, they start out at f/4 or f/5.6 at the wider end of the zoom range but then end up at f/6.3 or even f/7.1 when you zoom in all the way.
Finally, image stabilisation is always a great help. Modern mirrorless cameras can sometimes let you use a shutter speed that’s up to eight stops slower, so it can be crucial in reducing camera shake. However, it doesn’t help with a moving subject…!
Settings
Slow Black
Getting the right settings on a night drive is hard. Your guide will generally use a spotlight to illuminate your subject, but if you’re any good at physics, you’ll know that light diminishes with the square of distance. That means if you’re twice as far away, you’ll only get a quarter of the light (1/2²).
Finding an animal like a black leopard is hard at the best of times, so getting close enough to be able to take decent photos is a real challenge. Fortunately, I had a great guide who almost always managed to put me in a great position, and, after a bit of experimentation, I settled on the best settings for my ISO, aperture and shutter speed.
ISO
My general approach to wildlife photography is to shoot wide open in manual with auto ISO. However, that doesn’t work after sunset. Cameras are ‘told’ that the world reflects 18% of the light that falls on it, so they’ll try to brighten up photos taken at night—leaving you with a grey leopard and a monstrous ISO!
What you have to do is ‘fool’ the camera by deliberately underexposing by two or three stops. I chose to do that by using the exposure compensation dial on my Sony ⍺1. This works if you’re using any of the automatic exposure modes, ie manual with auto ISO or aperture or shutter priority. However, you could also switch to full manual if you prefer.
The Sony ⍺1 exposure compensation dial only goes down to -3 stops, which is a bit annoying, but when I tried to go full manual at -4 or -5 EV, the scene was so dark in my viewfinder that I couldn’t work out what was going on, so I had to switch back to using auto ISO!
Aperture
This is the easy one. There’s usually so little light that you have to shoot wide open. Yes, that does limit your depth of field, but that’s the least of your worries if you’re on a night drive…!
Shutter Speed (or Time Value)
This is the tricky one. Even if you’re shooting wide open at f/2.8 or f/4, you’ll probably still need to reduce your shutter speed from your normal, default value—unless you’re going for a slow pan! To freeze any movement, I generally set it at 1/1000 of a second for animals and 1/3200 for birds, but that’s impossible at night, and I had to go down to 1/320 or even 1/250 of a second.
The problem with such a low shutter speed is that it’s useless for fast-moving subjects as it leaves you with far too much motion blur. Fortunately, the black leopard in Laikipia was generally ambling around quite slowly, but I still ended up with a blurry mess a few times!
If I’d been in a hide at night and my subject had been stationary, I might have been able to use a slower shutter speed to produce a lower ISO and less noise by using what some people call the Doubling Rule. This relies on the fact that you can still get the odd sharp shot even at slow shutter speeds. It’s just a numbers game: the slower the shutter speed, the lower your hit rate and therefore the longer your bursts need to be.
What you need to do is start with your ideal shutter speed and then double the length of time your shutter is open while doubling the length of each subsequent burst. That might mean a short burst at 1/1000, then a longer one at 1/500, then an even longer one at 1/250 of a second and so on. When you eventually review your images, you can work backwards and simply pick the first sharp shot you find—which will automatically have the lowest ISO.
This is a great way to reduce noise in your images, and you’d be surprised how many sharp shots you can get at ridiculously slow shutter speeds, such as 1/60 or even 1/30 of a second. However, it doesn’t work with a moving subject as you’ll still get motion blur.
Technique
Dinnertime
Taking photographs successfully on a night drive is mostly about the right preparation. As Shakespeare once wrote, ‘The readiness is all!’ You have to work with your guide to find the best position and then react fast when you get a sighting. If you have the right equipment and dial in the right settings, you should get good results. However, there’s one final element, which is technique.
This is a broad category that encompasses location, transport and timing as well as photographic skill. When I was in Laikipia, I had to rent a bespoke ‘Black Leopard Vehicle’ for all my game drives for $350 a day! That was a bit steep, but it did give me a chance to use a safari truck that had been specifically customised for wildlife photography.
It had no doors in the passenger compartment, and one or two of the seats had been taken out so that guests could lie flat out on a long cushion to photograph the animals at eye level. This is crucial as it lets you take pictures that give the impression that the viewer is part of the animals’ world. The low point of view means that when you look at any of the images, you almost feel like you’re a leopard, say, or a lion.
Hiring the right vehicle gives you a good start, but what else do you need to do? Well, the main thing is to take long bursts. Some people seem addicted to single-shot, and even if they shoot in continuous mode, they seem scared to take ‘too many’ frames. This is probably a hangover from the days of film when individual rolls had to be bought and then processed.
However, digital photography changed all that. The marginal cost of taking a photo is zero, zilch, nada! That means there’s no such thing as taking ‘too many’ pictures. You can take as many as you like, which means you’ll have a far better chance of getting a truly great shot. Yes, you might have to spend a bit more time trawling through all your images, but that’s a trivial problem compared to the danger of missing the shot completely!
As I say, it’s a numbers game, and if you want to win the lottery, you need to buy as many tickets as you can…
Verdict
Panther
Let’s face it, night drives can sometimes be pretty boring if you don’t see much, and it can be very hard to take sharp photos without pushing your ISO up to a ridiculous high! However, if you have the chance to see something unique, such as a black leopard, then it’s worth having a go.
I hope this article has given you a few ideas on the right equipment, settings and techniques for night drives. In the words of Paul Simon, “Hello, darkness, my old friend…”
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