> 6 minute read

Using Mixed Lighting at Night

There are all kinds of light in your average urban landscape, from the artificial illumination of streets and buildings to the glow left by the sun in the twilight sky. Bring all this together, and you have the potential for some great landscape photography.

When we talk about photographing with mixed lighting, what we’re really referring to is when we have multiple light sources that have different colour temperatures. This can be a real challenge when, for example, creating an interior portrait – which light source do we use to set our white balance in order to get a natural result?

That said, there are other mixed lighting situations that are less of a headache to cope with, where the mixed colour temperatures can be used to create something spectacular and creative. Cityscapes at night are a good example: myriad types of artificial lighting – all with slightly different colour temperatures – vying for attention, creating a riot of bright, bold colour.

Consider the average city scene just before or just after sunset. You’ll see light from:

• The sky, which is orange in the ‘golden hour’ and purple/blue in the ‘blue hour’.
• Streetlights, which often have a distinctive orange glow.
• Headlights, brake lights and indicators of cars, which leave white, red or yellow trails when photographed with long exposures.
• Shop windows, with colourful displays lit by halogen lights.
• Office windows lit by fluorescent lighting that can take on a green cast.

And probably many more light sources, too. The key to photographing a scene like this is not to try and make things look more like daylight, but to embrace the confusion of colour. That said, white balance is important here, as different settings will produce pictures with different looks.

Get Your Timing Right

Picking the colour of the sky in your picture is a fundamental thing to decide, and the first thing to tackle. Depending in the time of day you photograph, the sky will be either:

• Warm orange – in the golden hour, just before sunset or just after sunrise.
• Cool blue – in the blue hour, just after sunset or just before sunrise.
• Black – at night, when all traces of sunlight have faded.

Of course, the way in which each of these very different canvases is selected is by carefully choosing the right time of day or night to photograph. Research your location well, so you know where to stand and what to photograph well in advance of the light being right. You can predict when the golden and blue hours will be by using an online tool like the The Photographer’s Ephemeris, which also tells you where the sun will be at any specific time.

If you’re not sure which look to go for, arrive in time for the golden hour, then shoot right the way through blue hour, too, and into the night. You’ll get the full gamut of backdrop colours.

White Balance

There is no ‘correct’ white balance for scenes like this, so learn to see white balance as a creative tool that you can use to give your images a distinctive look and feel, a little like Film Simulation modes. You can adjust white balance by either selecting a preset, such as Daylight, Fluorescent, or even something off-the-wall like Underwater. You can also fine-tune these presets to adapt them to your needs. Or you can set a colour temperature manually from the White Balance setting.

You can see the effect of these changes onscreen or in the camera’s viewfinder. (If you’re using Manual exposure mode, make sure that PREVIEW EXP./WB IN MANUAL MODE option is turned on from the SET UP > SCREEN SETTING menu.)

You could also try white balance bracketing, whereby each time the shutter is released, the camera takes one photo and processes it to create three copies: one at the current white balance setting, one with fine-tuning increased by the selected amount, and another with fine-tuning decreased by the selected amount.

Take Care with Dynamic Range

From the dark, inky blue sky to the bright lights of shop windows, the range of brightness levels in a nighttime cityscape can be huge! To retain detail in these extremes, we need to be mindful of dynamic range and use our cameras’ abilities to expand dynamic range.

Use the Dynamic Range setting in the Q Menu if you need to: setting it to 400% will bring back details in both highlights and shadows and you’ll be able to see the difference onscreen or in your camera’s viewfinder. If you need more dynamic range, think about bracketing your exposures by ±2 stops then merging them afterwards in post-production using HDR software.

Shoot RAW to Give Yourself Flexibility

If you’re not the sort of person who likes to do all of this in-camera, or you would just prefer to concentrate on composition rather than technical matters, then photographing RAW should be considered essential for this type of photography.

When post-processing a RAW file, you can set white balance and dynamic range retrospectively and make much larger changes to exposure, contrast, and colour than you would when working with JPEGs.

Try Black & White

This might sound weird when talking about how to photograph colour cityscapes, but flipping into black & white should always be an option. Not only does it free you from having to worry about colour casts and white balance, but by removing colour from the photograph entirely, you are free to concentrate on other things – like shapes, textures, and patterns – that otherwise go unnoticed.

Try this by visualising the scene in monochrome using one of your camera’s black & white Film Simulation modes. You’ll see the result onscreen or in the camera’s viewfinder. And you can always use Film Simulation mode bracketing to frame both colour and mono versions of the scene at the same time, if you wish.

Your Next Steps

CHALLENGE Get out and photograph a nighttime cityscape, and try to get as many different colours of light as you can in to the picture. Post your favourite image to social media with the hashtag #learnwithfujifilm. You can also submit your work here for a chance to be featured on our social media channels.