Night photography with a digital camera can be a very difficult but rewarding. During the holiday season, when days get shorter, we often want to capture photographs of outdoor moments, such as Christmas caroling or our home light displays. However, these desires are often frustrated when all our digital cameras capture is blackness or unintelligible blurs. Depending on the type of camera you own, there are different ways to approach the problem.

Some simple consumer grade cameras come with a preset night mode, but the resulting pictures are oftentimes blurry with streaky color. This effect can be good if you want to pretend to take pictures of ghost or enter an art contest for high schoolers, but it’s less than thrilling for those of us who want to capture an actual moment. An easy solution is to invest in a tripod or monopod, or simply rest the camera on a surface more stable than your hand. A flat, steady surface is a necessity for quality night photography taken on a simple digital camera.

For those who own higher end cameras, there are three aspects that can be adjusted to increase your camera’s ability to capture night images: ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. ISO refers to the sensitivity of the light sensor in your digital camera, the chip that actually translates the light that hits it into binary language and then an intelligible image. Your aperture setting refers to the size of the aperture’s diameter and is measured in f stops starting at 2.2 or 2.8 and running to 16 or 32.F2.2 will let the greatest amount of light in, while 32 will let in the least. Shutter speed refers to the about of time the camera sensor is exposed; the longer it is exposed the more light it can take in and the better image it can produce.

To take a good night picture on a higher end camera, switch your camera to manual.Start by adjusting you shutter speed. Start with the shutter speed because, unlike the aperture or ISO setting, it won’t have an adverse effect on the graininess of your image or depth of field. The great thing about digital photography is that you can experiment and see right away what effect each small change has on your image. Take a picture and if you are unhappy with the result, slow the shutter speed down progressively until you are. A typical shutter speed for an urban night light setting is usually 2 to 3 seconds.

If you have slowed your shutter speed all the way down and still are not happy with the exposure or are in a situation where you need to shoot quickly or shoot movement, you can adjust the aperture by opening it up. For night shooting you will typically need to adjust your aperture to its most open position, f2.2 or 2.8, or f1.6 in the case of some cameras.

If that doesn’t do the job, increase your ISO. When dealing with ISO, the lower the number, the greater the sensitivity to light, so an ISO of 80 will be more sensitive (better for night shooting) than an ISO of 160. Increasing your camera’s sensitivity will increase the amount of noise that appears in you images. Because of this, I wouldn’t recommend adjusting you camera’s ISO to below 80 if you can avoid it.

As the winter continues on, good luck capturing this year’s memories. Play around with these tips, and just maybe this will be the year that you’ll capture the night images that have eluded you. A custom oil painting of a starlit scene is truly spectacular, but you need the photograph first!