Need advice on night flying picture settings; cannon eos kiss x4

[evamodel00]

Hey guys! I am pretty new when it comes to digital photography, and I just wanted to get some opinions.

I am going to be going on a night flight soon through NYC and am hoping to get some great photos... However, whenever I fly at night I can never get any good pictures. The shutter speed is always increased on auto so I get blurry lights all over the place. Tough to keep it completely stationary on a small aircraft.

Anyways, can anyone recommend a specific mode or set of settings that could get me some good pictures on my trip? My camera has A-DEP, M, Av, Tv, P, and CA as far as manual modes go. I am not a professional by any means though so i basically just use auto all the time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I wanna snag some awesome shots!

[jrhoffman75]

Three factors control exposure - shutter speed, aperture and ISO. In your situation you should set the camera to Av mode, set the lowest possible aperture value and set the ISO to the highest value. That will give you the highest possible shutter speed.

[evamodel00]

Thank you very much jrhoff!! I appreciate it.

Since I am taking these pictures from a plane, do you think that even with the lowest aperture value, the photo could still be focused/not-blurred? I read that low aperture settings make shooting backgrounds/distance difficult. The lowest my camera will go is 4.0 it looks like.

[jrhoffman75]

If you have the camera on auto focus it won't fire the shutter unless it is in focus. As long as there aren't any reflections on the plane window to confuse the focus it should focus on the lights (i.e. infinity). You can always shift the lens to manual focus and focus yourself.

Depending on how brigt the lights are you may still get wiggly lights if the shutter speed isn't fast enough due to camera motion from vibration of plane and your shake. Just be as still as posible and don't let camera touch window of plane.

Low aperture values have a shallow depth of field, which means it will be difficult to have items that are two different distances from the camera in focus at the same time, like two or three rows of people if you are shooting a group. In your case everything is one distance from the camera - infinity.

[Skirball]

I'd use Manual for that situation.  I'd open up the aperture as wide as my lens allows, I'd put the shutter speed to 1/40 - 1/60 depending on the focal length and how steady a shot I could get, and I'd inch up my ISO until I got the exposure I want. 

It starts to get difficult to hand hold a camera at around 1/60. The actual value will depend on your hands, how you’re holding it, focal length used, image stabilization used, distance to subject, etc.  But usually 1/60 is in the ballpark.  If I only have one shot at something, I’ll use a higher shutter speed.  Of course, if your subject is moving, then you have to use faster speeds as well.  But from a plane the ground doesn’t move very fast until you get close.  So use as slow a speed as you can get away with if you’re trying to maximize your light.

Semi-auto functions like Av don’t always do a great job with night scenes because your camera doesn’t realize that you want it to be dark in the shadows, so it tries to pull up the exposure too much.  You can use exposure compensation, but in a relatively static situation like from an airplane I’d just use manual and dial in what I want, adjusting as necessary.

Depth of field won’t be an issue if you’re only shooting the ground below.  If you’re trying to get the wing in with the ground that’s a different story…