How to shoot videos at night

There are many occasions when you need to shoot videos at night. Many camcorders have a night scene mode. The night mode slows down your shutter speed and increased your exposure time so the background will get brighter.

However, automatic settings don’t necessarily give you the best videos and the following are the tips to shoot the best videos at night:

Tip 1: Manually set shutter speed
Gain control by yourself, switch to the manual mode, and set the shutter speed by yourself. You can try different speeds to see which speed gives you the best videos under the lighting conditions when the videos are shot. Then you can select the speed that enables you to shoot the best videos. As you move to different places with different lighting conditions, you do the same to get the best shutter speed for each condition.

Tip2: Use wide angle
When you shoot videos at night, you want to make the best out of the lighting you have. Wide angle allows you to get more light into the camcorder, which will give you better results than using regular angle. Therefore, before

Tip3: Do not zoom
If you zoom in to shoot a subject, it will greatly reduce the amount of light that goes into your camcorder, which will result in very dark videos. If you want to get a good video of a certain subject, try to get as close as possible but make sure you are safe when you get close.

Tip 4: Set your camcorder to manual focus and exposure
To make sure that your camera is set up to capture the best possible images, you should use the manual settings to do the focus and the exposure. Mostly likely, you can place the camcorder to manual mode by a button or switch on one of the sides of the camcorder, if not, you just turn to the manual to learn how.

Tip 5: Use a tripod
Stabilizing your camcorder is very important for making great videos, especially when the lighting conditions are not desirable. The best way to stabilize your camcorder while shooting is to use a tripod. There are many tripods available, the more robust your tripod is, the more likely you will get better videos. If you are in a situation that you can’t use a tripod, make sure you take the videos using both hands to hold your camcorder and stand steady to keep your camcorder as steady as possible.

Tip 6: ISO
When you shoot videos at night using the night mode, the ISO is automatically set to be very high, so your camcorder can be more sensitive to lights. However, this may result in grainy videos. When you have successfully applied the above five tips, a 400 ISO can already be decent as you do not need very high ISO when other conditions are favorable.