Great photographs with your point and shoot camera part 1...

I have been looking into some methods of capturing better images with my point and shoot camera since it is easier to carry it around and I would be uncomfortable pulling out my pro camera in some social situations. The point and shoot is smaller, more discrete, and people are sometimes more comfortable being in front of it. The example photograph used in this blog is from my girlfriends birthday in which we went to the Biltmore in Coral Gables. I wanted to capture some scenes from the night in quality images without disturbing the mood.


The first thing you may want to get rid of for more interesting lighting in your night shots is the use of on camera flash (except in some cases which I will explain in part 2 of this blog.) The flash causes flat lighting on your subject and does nothing for lighting the background. This image would have been black apart from the woman and the first few steps had I used my on camera flash to expose for the shot.
To shoot at night without the flash you must choose scenes that have some available light and then set the camera to a high ISO (this causes an increase in noise which I think is an acceptable sacrifice.) In an extreme low light situation the shutter speed is going to be very slow so be prepared to keep a steady hand or use a tripod. On this night I chose situations that mainly had multiple light sources so that I could maintain a snapshot theme and would not have to bring any equipment into the situation.
In this image the warm light from the tungsten bulbs lights her right side while the cool light from the twilight falls on her left side. I have attached a few more examples of shooting at night with no flash from this night.