Taking good video of holiday lights
December 9, 2020 8:08 AM Subscribe
I've been asked to do video of a holiday light display with my iPhone. Help me do this well. Seeking information and/or resources to move me along the learning curve for this.
My workplace does a holiday lights display. We are open to visitors at a strictly limited capacity and there are a good number of people who won't be able to go due to the limited capacity and to needing to stay safe at home. I would like to make a video of the lights for those who can't make it. I've done daylight video with my phone before but knowing that I found taking photos of the lights in the dark difficult, I'm prepared for this to not be as simple as pointing and shooting. What can I do to get decent video? I have a tripod. I have a gimbal.
I also have a Nikon D3500 that does video but it is a recent acquisition (last week) and I've never used it (or any other non-phone-camera) for video before. Should I be using that and not the phone? I don't have a gimbal for that but do have a tripod.
I've tried googling this but ended up in a swamp of links to how to take good still photos of holiday lights.
My workplace does a holiday lights display. We are open to visitors at a strictly limited capacity and there are a good number of people who won't be able to go due to the limited capacity and to needing to stay safe at home. I would like to make a video of the lights for those who can't make it. I've done daylight video with my phone before but knowing that I found taking photos of the lights in the dark difficult, I'm prepared for this to not be as simple as pointing and shooting. What can I do to get decent video? I have a tripod. I have a gimbal.
I also have a Nikon D3500 that does video but it is a recent acquisition (last week) and I've never used it (or any other non-phone-camera) for video before. Should I be using that and not the phone? I don't have a gimbal for that but do have a tripod.
I've tried googling this but ended up in a swamp of links to how to take good still photos of holiday lights.
Response by poster: Yes, I’ll do some shooting at dusk. I will have limited time this evening and on Friday at dusk. I will have more days where I can shoot at dawn.
How can I improve my shooting in the dark?
posted by sciencegeek at 9:21 AM on December 9, 2020
How can I improve my shooting in the dark?
posted by sciencegeek at 9:21 AM on December 9, 2020
On a camera you have three variables that control the brightness of the resulting image, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO.
Shutter speed, the camera gear you're using will shoot video at 30 or 24 frames per second which means the slowest shutter speed you can use is 1/30th or 1/24th of a second. Which in the context of shooting in the dark isn't that long of a shutter speed. (If you were shooting still photos you might try and shoot at 1-15 seconds or 30-450 times longer.) So, you probably can't get enough light by playing with the shutter speed.
So, we now look at aperture, I'm assuming that you're using the lens that's typically bundled with the D3500 -- the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6. Lower numbers on the aperture mean that you get more light, higher numbers less light. f/3.5 isn't that low of an aperture number so even at f/3.5 you probably can't get enough light. (You could see if you could talk your work into buying you a lens with a lower f-number.)
That leaves us with ISO, which basically is an amplification of the light that is coming into the camera, so if you increase the ISO beyond a certain point you will have unattractive grainy images. I haven't used the D3500 but I would guess the images will be grainy before they are bright enough to satisfy.
Disregarding the grain you could probably shoot video at a shutter speed of 1/30th, f/3.5, at 3200 or 6400 ISO and get images of the lights. I would definitely use a tripod for this. If you have access to the Adobe Suite After Effects has a pretty effective noise removal tool to clean up the footage that you get.
You might try shooting a timelapse of the lights at night, that would let you use a longer shutter speed and a lower ISO and maybe catch some clouds or stars moving across the sky.
Basically shooting video at night is hard, and is one of those situations where having more expensive gear is really helpful.
posted by gregr at 2:51 PM on December 9, 2020
Shutter speed, the camera gear you're using will shoot video at 30 or 24 frames per second which means the slowest shutter speed you can use is 1/30th or 1/24th of a second. Which in the context of shooting in the dark isn't that long of a shutter speed. (If you were shooting still photos you might try and shoot at 1-15 seconds or 30-450 times longer.) So, you probably can't get enough light by playing with the shutter speed.
So, we now look at aperture, I'm assuming that you're using the lens that's typically bundled with the D3500 -- the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6. Lower numbers on the aperture mean that you get more light, higher numbers less light. f/3.5 isn't that low of an aperture number so even at f/3.5 you probably can't get enough light. (You could see if you could talk your work into buying you a lens with a lower f-number.)
That leaves us with ISO, which basically is an amplification of the light that is coming into the camera, so if you increase the ISO beyond a certain point you will have unattractive grainy images. I haven't used the D3500 but I would guess the images will be grainy before they are bright enough to satisfy.
Disregarding the grain you could probably shoot video at a shutter speed of 1/30th, f/3.5, at 3200 or 6400 ISO and get images of the lights. I would definitely use a tripod for this. If you have access to the Adobe Suite After Effects has a pretty effective noise removal tool to clean up the footage that you get.
You might try shooting a timelapse of the lights at night, that would let you use a longer shutter speed and a lower ISO and maybe catch some clouds or stars moving across the sky.
Basically shooting video at night is hard, and is one of those situations where having more expensive gear is really helpful.
posted by gregr at 2:51 PM on December 9, 2020
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There are other more complicated solutions to this problem, but I would try twilight first.
posted by gregr at 8:23 AM on December 9, 2020 [4 favorites]