Q&A: What Makes a Camera Good for Night Photography?
What should I look for in a camera to take good night photos?
--Ron and Linda Munoz, Yosemite, California
There are a couple of features that any camera should have if you want to take pictures after the sun goes down.
Virtually all digital cameras have a built-in flash, but that peters out in just 10 to 15 feet. It pays to look for cameras that are compatible with external flash units, since most of those can easily illuminate up to 50 feet away.
If you're interested in more-creative flash shots, look for cameras that have special modes like slow sync, which allows you to set the flash to fire at the start of a longer exposure, or rear-curtain, which fires the flash at the end.
To envision the effects you could achieve with the two modes, imagine photographing a moving car at night. If you used slow sync, you would capture the car at the beginning of the exposure. As the exposure continued, however, the light trails would still be recorded; they'd show up in the final image trailing ahead of the car, giving an impression of the vehicle moving backwards. Using rear-curtain would capture the trails first, so that in the completed image, the car would offer an impression of streaking forward through the night. Of course, these are only two examples of what you could do--your creativity can kick in to explore the many other uses.
Finally, I'd make sure the camera gives you the ability to control the shutter speed so you can take long exposures; better cameras let you dial in a shutter speed of up to 8 or even 16 seconds. And the ability to set your own ISO (which tells the image sensor to be more or less sensitive to light) is indispensable for capturing detail in night photos without using a flash. Some digital cameras let you set the ISO from a "normal" level of about 100 all the way up to 800.
There are many cameras that have some or all of these traits. Here are some of my favorites:
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