How To Choose The Right Shutter Speed For Night Street Photography
In order to get sharp shots at night, you will need a fairly fast Shutter Speed of around 1/125 sec - 1/200 sec. If you pick a slower value you risk the chance of getting blurry shots. If you go much faster, depending on your ISO value, you risk your exposure becoming underexposed.
However, there are many factors in choosing the best Shutter Speed for your night street photography settings. Let's take a deep dive into how to choose the best Shutter Speed for your nighttime street photography.
Shutter Speed and Street Photography
When you are capturing street photos during the day, especially when the light is good, Shutter Speed is your friend. To ensure sharp shots you can use a Shutter Speed of at least 1/200 sec, all the way up to 1/4000 sec (or whatever fast speed is your camera's limit). You can also keep your ISO low and use a fairly narrow Aperture. Basically, you have a lot more room to play with your exposure.
At night it is a different story. The majority of the time, you have to bump up your ISO.
Your ISO is your cameras' sensitivity to light with regards to either a digital sensor or a film sensor. As you increase your ISO it becomes more sensitive to light, which means, at night, you can use a lower Shutter Speed and a wide Aperture in order to get a decent exposure.
Because light is scarce at night, you have to increase your ISO in order to get a proper exposure, and you will increase it depending on how much ambient light there is on the street, or wherever it is you are shooting.
This photo was taken just before sunset. Because there is still decent light I was able to shoot this at ISO 100, f /5.6, 1/250 sec.
However, in this street photo, I had no choice but to increase the ISO to 1600 even though there are quite a few lights from the street and the shop lights. So that I could get a proper exposure, I had to use a Shutter Speed of 1/125 sec and an aperture of f /3.2.
Shutter Speed and the Exposure Triangle
it's pretty simple -
The faster your Shutter Speed the more fast-paced action you will be able to capture without any blur. However, the faster your Shutter Speed the darker the exposure will be. This is because the shutter is open for less amount of time, so less light will be hitting the sensor. Conversely, the slower the Shutter Speed the more light there is hitting your sensor as the camera's shutter is open for a longer period of time, but the more image blur there will be. However, this is just one part of the exposure triangle. There is also Aperture and ISO.
Aperture
Wide Apertures are important at night as you want to let enough light through your lens, to hit the sensor, along with using a high ISO value, in order to get proper exposure. In exactly the same way as fast Shutter Speeds are darker - narrow Apertures are darker too. This is because you are narrowing the diaphragm of your lens, (making it smaller) thereby letting less light in.
Even though a wide Aperture gives you a shallow depth of field which will make the background more blurry, you can still get sharp shots for street photography - as the further away you are from your subject the more depth of field there will be, even with a wide Aperture.
Also, because you are generally using short focal lengths for street photography (anything from 24mm - 50mm), your depth of field will be wider than if you used a longer focal length lens.
So imagine that you want to shoot a street at night and there is very little light, just one single street lamp. However, you really want as much depth of field as possible so you opt for Aperture of f /11 and you want to capture people on bikes riding underneath the street lamp so you choose a Shutter Speed of 1/500 sec. Even when you crank up the ISO to 6400, the image will be too dark because there is very little light, so you decide to increase the ISO to 128,000, but now you're getting way too much noise in your image and it is still a little too dark. You drop your ISO back down to 6400. The only thing that you can do at this point is to make your Aperture wider. So you decide to open it up all the way to the lenses widest Aperture of f /1.2. Your exposure is still too dark however so you have one more option. You slow your Shutter Speed to 1/200 sec. now the exposure is spot on and these bikers aren't exactly running the Tour de France, so you think this will be a sufficient Shutter Speed in order to capture them sharply.
ISO
If you're in a place such as Times Square where the lights are very bright even at night time, you can potentially use a low ISO of 100 - 800 and still get a decent exposure, even when using fastish Shutter Speeds and narrow Apertures.
For night street photography, it is generally when you need a fast Shutter Speed and the conditions are very dark that you need to increase the ISO and use a wide Aperture.
A word on Noise
As my mother always said, "Don't worry about the noise." This is true for all kinds of street photography, especially when shooting at night. Cameras these days can get decent fairly clean images up to ISO 6400. Noise reduction software and in Lightroom is pretty great too. In truth when shooting street photos, capturing the shot is more important than worrying about a bit of grain in your image; besides grain can look pretty atmospheric and give an image character.
A Word on Image Stabilization
If your camera or your lens has image stabilisation built-in then you can handhold the camera and get sharp shots even if your Shutter Speed is quite slow. At night, I have personally been able to get sharp shots at 1/100 sec, with image stabilisation turned on my Sony A7RIII.
The best way to find out at which minimum Shutter Speed you can get sharp shots with is simply to practise at night.
The Shutter Speed Focal Length Rule
The Shutter Speed focal length rule dictates that whatever focal length you are using on your camera whilst hand-holding, denotes which minimum Shutter Speed you can comfortably use to capture sharp shots.
For instance, if I am shooting with a 35mm lens, then theoretically, I can hold the camera and get sharp shots at 1/35 sec.
Once again, this may vary depending upon whether your camera has image stabilisation (you may be even able to handhold the camera and get sharp shots at even slower Shutter Speed), what the light conditions are, and how steady your hand holding ability is.
The Importance of Night Lights
Imagine if you went out to take some photographs at night and there were no street lights, there were no shop lights, and there were no car lights. How would you take a photo? Answer - you wouldn't. Night lights for street photography are your light! In the same way that you need God-given daylight during the day to take a photo and get a decent exposure, at night you need man-made lights in order to get any exposure and take a photo.
But how much man-made light there is, ultimately impacts your settings, including your Shutter Speed. If at night, you are on a street that has a multitude of shop lights, street lamps dotted up and down the street and cars whizzing past with their headlights on, you might well have enough light to use a fast Shutter Speed of 1/250 sec or faster, whilst using a low ISO value and a mid Aperture of around f/8. Conversely, if it is pretty dark, and there is just one shop light on in the whole street and you're capturing somebody walking past, then you are going to have to increase your ISO and use a wide Aperture, in order to select a fast enough Shutter Speed, so that you can capture the passer-by sharply.
Auto ISO Minimum Shutter Speed
There is an awesome setting on modern cameras these days called Auto ISO Minimum Shutter Speed.
Put simply, you choose an ISO range that you want your camera to stay within, such as, if you are shooting at night, an ISO range of 800 - 6400. You then set a minimum Shutter Speed of 1/160 sec, (or whatever minimum Shutter Speed you know that you can comfortably hand hold and get sharp shots with).
So imagine if you are using this setting in Aperture Priority Mode. You choose an aperture of f /5.6. Your Auto ISO range is 800 - 6400 and your minimum shutter speed is 1/125 sec, as you know that you can comfortably hold the camera at this Shutter speed and get sharp shots.
You walk around town at night and depending on how light a street is the camera changes the Shutter Speed from 1/320 sec - down to 1/200 sec and keeps your ISO at the base level of 800. Then suddenly it gets darker, or you walk into a much darker street. To get a proper exposure the camera reduces the Shutter Speed down to the minimum that you set, of 1/125 sec, however, it is still too dark to get a decent exposure. So now the camera decides to increase the ISO up to 3200, and you get a perfectly exposed shot.
As you can see Auto ISO Minimum Shutter Speed takes away the fiddling with exposure values, so you can concentrate solely on composition and getting that decisive shot. It works not only in aperture priority but also in shutter priority and manual mode too. Check out my guide for much more information.
Capturing Sharp Images at Night
Let's take a look at a few examples and we will go through the settings that I used, including the Shutter Speed.
It was just passing blue hour and there was some light coming off of the buildings and lights nearby so I was able to shoot this photo at ISO 100 f /8 1/125 sec.
I wanted to make sure that I would capture the passerby sharply so I used a Shutter speed of 1/200 sec. ISO 1000, f /2.8.
As you can see it was quite dark where I was standing so I had to use an ISO of 6400. Once again, I wanted to make sure that I could capture the subject without any blur, so I used a Shutter Speed of 1/200 sec and an aperture of f /2.8.
It was getting really dark here so I used my upper limit ISO of 6400. I used the widest aperture of my lens, f /2.8 and once again, used a Shutter Speed of 1/200 sec.
Conclusion
From what has been discussed in this article, you can see that the best Shutter Speed to use for night street photography really does depend on a number of factors.
How bright or dark are the conditions you are in? What focal length are you using on your camera? How steady are your hands at holding the camera without any shake? For proper nightfall conditions, I can get away with a Shutter Speed of 1/100 sec up to 1/250 sec. However, this is always subject to change.
Go forth and create.